400

9 to 25 March 2010

Gosia Wlodarczak
Longin Sarnecki

Curated by Stephen Gallagher

This collaborative project documents 400 days and 400 hours of being together. It is both a love story and a life story, captured through a drawing capsule and in written diary. The work creates an immersive space where one can experience the ambiguity between drawing and text, between image and story, between perception and memory.

images

Essay

For 400 the gallery becomes a time capsule, the combined diary documenting an extended moment spent together by Gosia Wlodarczak and Longin Sarnecki. It is a window into the private interactions between the two, presenting through drawing and text recordings the time spent with each other in the daily rituals of their domestic environment. Wlodarczak periodically draws, capturing her immediate visual surrounding in 800 panels of half hour sketches. Each page comprises of varying densities of layered contour line. Simultaneously Sarnecki notes the activity of 400 days in diary entries that form marching rows of text.

400 creates an ambiguous zone between the hand-drawn and machine-printed. It documents the present moment and the memory of that moment through image and story. It creates a zone where both the drawing and the text become blurred when displayed en masse to cover the gallery walls, floor to ceiling.

Wlodarczak's practice is a manifestation of perceiving and dwelling in areas of human thought, behaviour and experience. It is an attempt to interrogate and archive a realization of being; of being present, within space, time, and language, through drawing. Wlodarczak's 400 hours is an archive of moments frozen by the repetition of human glances and transformed into materiality through the layering of line. In each of the 800 panels is the building of shapes or fragments of shapes that shift between the abstract and the representational - her immediate 'real time' environment.

'I draw my environment as I see it, in real time - tracing and re-tracing the visible. My aim is to record continuous time, the present moment and my mind's realization of now, attempting to translate my living energy into the drawn line. The line is processed by my sense of sight and communicated through my body. I try to draw what I look at, before it is classified by my mind, memory, and knowledge.' 1

Within 400 hours there is the identification of familiar objects buried within the natural/organic rhythm of overlaying lines. Similarly the text of Sarnecki's 400 days, without the understanding of Polish required to read the text, becomes simply that - text. Rhythmic row-upon-row of font, spacing, sentences and paragraphs blend to become a grey area that the subconscious grasps at for identifiable shapes. The work is both a diary and an organic landscape formed by text.

But the reading of the text of 400 days reveals much more, for it is the documentation of moments in time spend between the two, the shared personal interactions, situations and conversations of the two and of the others that have entered into their domestic space, along with the mundane, like the simple 'things to do' that are needed to make days productive.

This collaborative project which documents the 400 days and 400 hours of being together forms an en masse capturing of time, a registry of the everyday. It is both a love story and a life story.

Stephen Gallagher

Endnotes:
1 Wlodarczak G, 2007, http://www.gosiawlodarczak.com/Pages/Gosia.html