Cutting out the snow explores the construction of landscape through visual codes and social histories. Picturing the arctic through a series of found images of the Canadian north, which Genda has carefully cut-up to remove the snow, the collaged fragments of snow disrupt an easy reading of the landscape, playing on photographic tropes of presence and absence.
Dagmara Genda's Artist Statement:
Dagmara Genda's installations, collages and drawings are formally and conceptually structured by opposition: order and chaos, landscape and architecture, East and West, nature and culture. Knowing that many of these dichotomies are arbitrary, Genda uses them not as essential propositions but as organizational strategies whose rules might be manipulated or broken. The resulting works depend on a viewer's misinterpretation and misrecognition in order to propose new ways of looking at the world.
Over the past two years Genda has been primarily interested in the construction of landscape. Using WJT Mitchell's assertion that landscape is not a genre but a medium, she conceives of landscape as a network of art historical and social codes that affect how we approach nature, how we distinguish between nature and culture, and how we place ourselves within that framework.
An interview with Dagmara Genda:
Dagmara Genda (Koszalin, Poland 1981) is an artist and freelance writer. She has exhibited nationally including solo exhibitions at the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina, and the Esker Foundation, Calgary. Group exhibitions include the touring show Ecotopia, curated by Amanda Cachia, Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener + Area Biennial 2014, as well as various artist-run and public gallery show across the country. Internationally she has shown in Brooklyn, NY, Durham, NC, and attended residencies in the UK, China and US. Genda has an MA from the London Consortium, Birkbeck College and an MFA from Western University.
