** ARTIST'S TALK - SEPTEMBER 27TH, 3PM **

Please join us for a special artist's talk on Saturday, September 27th at 3pm! Kim will talk about her history in both painting and film and video and walk us through her process of creating the works and putting together the exhibition.

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Krowswork is pleased to announce Formation a solo exhibition of the work of Kim Miskowicz. In this exhibition Miskowicz melds two distinct impulses of her artistic output—painting and video—into bespoke works that bring these mediums together as a single piece.

Much of Miskowicz’s painting and video reference the landscape, mapping, and notions of a disrupted environment. In this exhibition, she elegantly projects videos onto paintings creating her own three-dimensional atlas of flickering place. The paintings are constructed  in relief, either out of built-up paint or, ingeniously, using postage label remnants to create literal hills, mountains, and plains. Onto each of these surfaces, she projects a video made specifically for each painting, which complements but also complicates (and even competes with) the painted landscapes. Even as the video produces its own brightness, shadow, and image, its directed light also becomes a stand-in for our own sense of vision and what it means to move through time and space, as if driving at night down a desolate road or hiking into a vast, empty canyon. With these thoughtful works, Miskowicz engenders a shared sense of discovery, invoking ideas of distance and desire. 

Miskowicz also presents in analog form the usually digital notion of augmented reality, and in this way actually replicates the geology she is picturing itself.  For example, in the work Incog on Seven Falls, we see a video of an igneous rock spinning in space. As she has videoed it, its form eventually dissipates into a brightly colored outline—the neon-ghosting of the supposedly solid form. As we watch this over the sculpted painting Seven Falls, the effect is to have the rocks of the cliffs in this painting become more and more solid. The painting becomes the real object, the “real” rock. Because the truth is that the rock we think of as our solid foundation is actually something, in most cases, very built up, through layers and layers, over millions of years. Her works allow us to both see and feel that the constant replication and augmentation of the Earth itself, this accelerating, layered rock that on which we live our lives.

In addition to their geological allusions, these works also reference the earliest film viewing devices, such as Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope, where one had to view the moving image through a peephole as the film spun inside the workings of a large, usually standing cabinet. Miskowicz has turned this process inside out: the painting becomes the cabinet through which the moving image is viewed. She also cites the films of James Benning as an influence, whose works employ long, almost still, often composited landscape views, thus upending the idea of linear narrative and, like Miskowicz’s work, making its story instead three-dimensional and sculptural.

In their subjects these painting/video works capture the quiet awe of the far-flung landscapes of the West—the broad desert expanses in her home state of New Mexico, as well as the stark granite cliffs of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. With a subtle eye to the power of the moving image to convey time’s passage by invoking light phasing into darkness, these works manifest a poetic sense of travel and both the personal and shared meaning that conjures in America, against beautifully rendered backdrops that trace the contours of our collective dream.