NEGATIVLAND
Negativland explores places loss, contradiction, disbelief and inversion. Landscapes rooted in contradiction, opposite realities, blank spaces, and misleading perspectives, Negativland brims with clouded vision, the presence of inexplicable sources of light, hyper-reflective surfaces, uncomfortable angles, and deceptively situated shadows to provide expressions of unnatural juxtapositions: in-between spaces in the midst of falling apart, non-places, unraveling landscapes where meaning shifts, and memory fails.
These semi-abstract scenes teeter between delicacy and disorder, referencing insignificant places that elude our attention, but still retain a feeling that something intrinsically irreplaceable has been lost. Semi-distinguishable scenes, abundant with the leftover detritus of uncertain places and eras, they exist with a touch of reality, a touch of idyllic reverie, and the bleary memory of the frailty and filth of spaces that know no specific locations. Each space is a question, and ceases to be self-evident. Time bears it away and leaves sites that are cloudy and undecipherable. Nothing resembles what was, memory deceives and abandons, and only these delicate, broken surfaces- barely visible remnants where what is left seems like a void- remain on paper.
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MARGARET INGA WIATROWSKI was born in Wroclaw, Poland in 1978. She received a BA in Literature from Barnard College, Columbia University in 2001 and a Master of Science in Design from Pratt Institute in 2004.
Most recently, Margaret was a recipient of the 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) fellowship for Drawing and has exhibited both drawing and photography at Red Roots Gallery, Rabbithole Gallery and Nurture Art Gallery in New York, as well as being featured in publications such as Diffusion Magazine and Reframing Photography, Photographic Theory and Practice.
In the words of one colleague, “She gives us the dross and jumble of what remains of the world, and invites us to see what we can make of it.” Margaret lives and works in New York City and Brooklyn, continuing to create imaginary realms while working across a variety of media.
More of Margaret’s work can be viewed on her website.