Chicago Cultural Center

Ungray: Color, Light and Other Balms
Exhibition Statement

Scott Wolniak's mixed media installation combines video, sculpture and drawing to simulate warmth and light. Referencing ideas from new-age healing practices, the artist intends to create an optical environment to relieve visitors from the frigid geo-seasonal condition. With the bleak Chicago winter as a backdrop, these works combine aspects of transcendental and metaphysical art with light and color therapies to evoke the summer sun and its visual effects. Through a conflation of nature and culture, Wolniak proposes that art's ability to nourish and transform may be virtual, but still similar to that of natural phenomena.

Wolniak explores gray as a state of mind in these various components of his installation. Taking the title of Ungray, he has created a meditation on the psychological state of mind induced by general absences of light and sun in winter. Most familiar here from Wolniak's previous projects is his incorporation of a row of artificial grass, made of paper, glue, tape and wire. This sculptural installation combines organic and mechanical processes by constructing a turf out of post-consumer debris and studio trash. The overall effect is naturalistic, however the piece was entirely improvised with no models or templates. The process of making or viewing the piece simulates the meditative experience of gardening or simply staring at grass. His colorful weeds rather ironically appear to grow out of the Cultural Center's carpeted floor.

Newer to his work are the two video pieces presented on adjacent walls. Healing Colors progresses through the color spectrum as specified by energy chakras to create a functional guided meditation. All footage comes from an inexpensive, commercially manufactured light-therapy box called the "Color Cube." The footage has been modified and composed to alter complexity, pacing and spatial depth of the ready-made light-color program. The soundtrack by Jim Dorling takes cues from new-age instructional texts, which define correlations between colors and sounds, musical notes and tonal frequencies.

Untitled (Cute Sunflare), shown on a video monitor explores shape and its many permutations with this moving, abstracted dark sun continually played off a background with solar flare. This image is experiential, somewhat silly and uplifting ─ from a source in handheld optics.

Wolniak's five works on paper, Simulated Sunprints, from a series of approximately eleven pieces, utilized bleach on paper to create drawings that produce the aesthetic of a sunprint, in which colored paper is faded by sunlight over a period of time, essentially using the sun as a medium. In this case, however, bleach has been used in place of sunlight to create the same effect, although with considerably more toxicity, volatility and material degradation. Each piece was folded in different patterns to further enhance the fading and final color effect, and to establish the distinct structure of each drawing.

A single, small framed photograph almost appears to be an afterthought. However, it presents us with a rainbow against a gray sky and is key to the color prism of Wolniak's overall concept for the show--ungray. For all the color in a radiant rainbow, gray results when all colors of the spectrum are blended together.

Scott Wolniak lives and works in Chicago. He holds a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1995) and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2002). Since 2003, Wolniak has been featured in ten solo exhibitions, and presented in nearly 50 group exhibitions and screenings from 1995 to the present. His works are included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Peter Norton, Santa Monica, CA; Peter Stern, NY; and numerous other private collections in the U.S. and Europe. Currently Wolniak teaches in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. In addition, he has curated and published for exhibitions in Chicago and Houston.

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