ARTIST STATEMENT
My work uses pattern and repetition to collapse and complicate depictions of time. Considering the ephemerality of flowers, my riotous floral depictions upend the expected pace of time and question what happens when anticipated cycles are disrupted, paused, or completely scrambled. In my paintings, I layer silhouetted botanical patterns over dense backgrounds of floral imagery that have been obsessively duplicated in visual stutters. Films of translucent paint selectively conceal and reveal conglomerations of plant life, creating windows or portals that symbolize entry points into a psychological realm. In my drawings, I distill floral patterns into lacy compositions that shift between illustrative contour tracings and monochromatic magic-eye images. My work borrows imagery from 17th-century Dutch still-lifes, which famously depict a variety of carefully cultivated flowers. Although presenting a fantastical view of our natural world, these paintings also include wilting blooms and bugs consuming leaves, symbolizing that all things are fleeting. My work exaggerates elements from these paintings to a fanatic degree. Petals droop into a cascading waterfall of duplicate images of the same flower as a bumblebee buzzes between five iterations of a reappearing lily. These vibrating gardens, which can only reside within our psyche, manipulate our linear understanding of time. Through intense attention to detail and hyperactive repetition, my work questions how time and perception works. Does our existence operate at the same speed as everything else around us? How does time move between waking life and dream life? And how does meditating on the intricacies of time change us?
ABOUT THE ARTIST
J Myszka Lewis received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has shown her work in solo exhibitions in south central Wisconsin and participated in many group exhibitions at places such as the International Print Center New York (New York, NY), Charles Allis Art Museum (Milwaukee, WI), Soap Factory (Minneapolis, MN), Museum of Wisconsin Art (West Bend, WI), Trout Museum of Art (Appleton, WI), and the Chazen Museum of Art (Madison, WI). She has participated in residencies at the Jentel Foundation in Banner, Wyoming, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska. She has been a finalist for a Luminarts Cultural Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship, the Hopper Prize, and the Forward Art Prize. In 2018, she received the Edna Wiechers Art in Wisconsin Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of the Arts. Her work is included in many private collections as well as the corporate collections of the Bank of Kaukauna, UW Health, and Fidelity Investments. J Myszka Lewis is based in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is also a curator at Tandem Press.
© J Myszka Lewis