Through the practice of drawing, painting and cartooning, Joanna Chelkowska’s work expresses issues that are at the border of the intimate and the collective: obsession with the body, loss of reference points, withdrawal into oneself. The notion of surface and content is at the heart of her subject. Her work, deeply rooted in the substance, develops through contact with the materials and tools present in the workshop. Her creative allies are paper, charcoal, pigments, and the eraser. She uses a simple formal vocabulary and simple gestures, but in the repetition and accumulation of the motif there are many symbolic layers that impart an emotional charge.
Chambre noire
Presented at Sporobole as part of the Festival Cinéma du Monde de Sherbrooke, Chambre noire is a cartoon project presented in the form of an installation. Three walls are arranged in the gallery to create an “empty room” on which different sequences of the animation are projected. For the past two years, Joanna Chelkowska has been working on a multitude of drawings and paintings representing a room where motifs emerge that cover the walls of these empty rooms in a filigree manner, evoking the parasitism of a virgin space. Based on the themes of confinement and the relationship between physical and mental spaces, Chelkowska is interested in the closed space in its simplest form: an empty room. The animated work, made with stencils and graphite pencils, has geometric shapes that move, transform and vanish. The shapes are drawn and erased immediately. Lines cross the walls in all directions to reproduce the optical effect of opposing forces: successively centrifugal and concentric. Through the installative layout of the animation, it is then possible to think of the drawing outside the sheet of paper, to extract it from its two-dimensional nature and to bring it to life through a digital experience. The artist wishes to invite the spectator to enter the work as one enters a real room, so that he can feel inhabited by the drawing being created.
