Maja Godlewska: WILDERNESS
Exhibition September 17 – October 8, 2020
Gatewood Gallery
Open Monday – Thursday 9:00 – 4:00pm

My creative interests have been centered on nature, travel, and the landscape in the age of electronic devices and social media. I have been researching the spectacle of global tourism in search of the Sublime landscape, consuming the wilderness, an anthropocentric, Enlightenment era construct assuming that as humans, we are forever alien entities. I have shadowed travelers in the most instagrammable destinations, including Mauritius, Sicily, Iceland, Greenland, Tasmania, and mainland Australia, Florida Keys and dozens of North American National and State parks. While I observe tourists and address human nature interface, humans have become increasingly absent from my work. Watercolor paper installations are my attempts at creating environments that would invite unhurried examination, for the viewer to follow their meandering form and variegated surfaces. They are my slow, defiant responses to the fast paced insta-consumption of the landscape in the pre-Covid19 world. These laborious works are meant to remind us of a simple act of being in nature, or really maybe just being. They are my meditations on places that I have seen, invitations to contemplate, to remember… to put the camera away. Ironically, the installations themselves have been quite popular as selfie backdrops when displayed in public.

Maja Godlewska