Artist Statement:

 

I work to imagine multiple layers of complexity and a minutiae of impressions to reveal a deeper story about perception. My artwork explores themes of memory, disconnect, and an unseen energy that I feel is in everything. I seek to represent the energy of thoughts, possibilities, and changes in the present by exploring notions of identity through mixed media collage. Mixed media is often employed to represent an expression of occurrences or a 'reality of states' in background atmospheres that are generated to mark suggestions of the personality of people, things, and surroundings. In creating spaces where subject matter changes or collides, my art tells a story of potential realities or thought forms that happen simultaneously, where both subject matter and viewer are able to escape into imperfect scenarios.

 

I combine figurative subject matter with abstract areas or patterns to create activity that appears flat or floating in time and space. This is to represent subconscious states and the quality of memory, the impressions we get from the immediate environment, and the effects people have on themselves. Are these impressions the truth? Are things quiet within or is there always some sort of noise playing background? What affect do we have on our own reality? I attempt to question if thoughts as energy can really be neutral, and whether we are entirely free. I would like to think so, but I'm not sure that this is a fair representation of reality. I have noticed things to be true and untrue at the same time.

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I invite an understanding of beingness in my art by re-imagining what it means to be human in the world at this time (sometimes disorientating, isolating, and fragmented). The activity of creating dream-like spaces assists in the loss that is sometimes felt when something is missing, restricted, unseen or gone. I imagine potential emotional 'states' and perceptual experiences like snapshots of possibilities that happen all at once through the accumulation of responses to time, space, and activity through process. I present subject matter that is delicately balanced between states of dissolution and harmony. Though seemingly chaotic, this is represented in an even distribution of colour that moves the eye, through repetition, through a proximity of images to each other, or through matter in the form of collage (whether paper or painted), through the use of materials. Each impression is equal in a way that is evident at once as a whole or can be unpacked more slowly and separately over time.

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Monika Raciborski is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Mississauga. She hold's a joint Specialist Degree in Art and Art History from The University of Toronto and Sheridan College. She completed her Masters of Fine Art with The University of Waterloo in 2008, and interned in Scotland in 2007 to work with UK artist Lucy Skaer, assisting in creating artwork for the Venice Biennial. Monika's focus is primarily drawing and painting. She is largely a mixed media artist who combines images with abstract elements to tell stories about perceptions of identity.