Originally from Brodnica, Poland, she earned her B.F.A. from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. She continued studies at Purdue University, where she earned an M.A., followed with an M.F.A
from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. While at Tyler, she spent a year studying in Rome, Italy. She has completed residencies at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Connecticut, the Frans Masereel Center in Belgium, the Cork Printmakers in Ireland and the Women's Studio Workshop in New York. Solo exhibits include Liminal Passages at Longwood College in Virginia, The Distance Between at the Limerick Printmakers Gallery in Ireland and Contain/Retain at the Cocoon Gallery in Kansas City. Currently Monika teaches at the University of Saint Francis, Fort Wayne, IN http://monikameler.viewbook.com/ |
Artist Statement:
“The thing we call a place is the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a fixed location.” Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness My artwork examines actual and constructed memory, especially as it related to my upbringing in Poland and immigration to the United States. My recollections of the places I occupied in Poland and in my initial years in Chicago, the city I immigrated to, serve as the whirling, mixing, dissolving, and exploding forces that Rebecca Solnit references in The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness. Memory is liminal. Remembering a place is not an act of recollecting the actual place but our last memory of that place. Therefore, my work is often an abstraction of a place, space, building, folktale, or event that had a lasting impression. I use images that reference my father’s elaborate gardens, my mother’s colorful textiles, the Slavic folktale of the Baba Jaga, and the majestic skyscrapers of Chicago. Images repeat, change direction, and dominance. All of these actions mimic the actions of memory. |
I'd like to thank the great print assistants we had on this project: Jason Clark, Beth Huhtala, Shelby Hanson, David Tarullo and Tressa Jones.
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