The Heart Is Not a Well,
It Is a Fountain
Solo exhibition by Monika Wiatrowska
Curated by Alejandro A. Barbosa
August 2024
'The Heart Is Not a Well, It Is a Fountain' presents a selection of Monika Wiatrowska's still life works, including pieces produced in collaboration with artist Alex Waber.
The exhibition focuses on the artist's photographic practice and includes staged and unstaged works on fabric and paper. These works express the artist's interest in the representation of the absent body, beauty, banality, the relationship of objects with intimacy and memory, the passage of time, decay, the domestication of organic and synthetic materials, and the codification of natural and artificial light in contemporary photographic imagery.
Given that Wiatrowska's tableaux aim to formalize her desire to translate multisensorial and cognitive experiences into images, much of her work originates in her writing practice. Her observations of sensory experiences are repurposed toward her visual work by transferring her impressions to the construction of her still lifes.
The central work in the show, Fuck Everlasting, originated in Wiatrowska and Waber's intention of challenging the still life's typical stasis, embracing the artifice of expressing temporality via photographic imagery. In contrast to the full control provided by a studio setting, the work is arranged and photographed outdoors where accidents, decay, shifts in lighting, and the progression of time are all equal participants in a setting where non-human bodies and forms coalesce with what is domesticated and human-made.
[More installation views coming soon]