Goldfinch is proud to present “Alight," a solo exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Scott Wolniak in Gallery II.
Wolniak's multi-disciplinary practice encompasses painting, drawing, video, and sculpture; in all media, the Chicago-based artist is concerned with building relationships and spaces that he has described as "contemplative and funny." Wolniak strives to create pictorial spaces that ask for and reward "slow" ways of looking.
"The accumulation of small marks, chance operations and textural fragments creates optical energy, and embodies an off-kilter sort of life-force that I think of as my style," Wolniak recently noted. "Disparate sources such as natural phenomena, urban decay, new-age symbolism and studio-craft merge to illuminate everyday life within a cosmic context."
In the new series of paintings and cut paper works included in Alight, invented botanical forms are the starting point for artistic improvisation. Plants and grass imagery provide Wolniak with "a flexible structural motif" that function both as symbols of the natural world as well as allegories for human behavior.