Jim Mroczkowski

Go into one house come out of another + zoom

No Time for Anticipation + zoom

Artist Statement

I enjoy the aesthetics of accumulation and the challenge of juxtaposing arbitrary, symbolic and meaningful image-making. I like stark austerity and extravagance to coexist within the same field to present a feeling of some grandeur.

Some say that my image development is aimless, tragicomic meandering...it often is...but that is a consequence of the battle that I have with the rectangle and the sustained struggle between form and content...never certain which will or should dominate, let alone survive. This results in frequent reworking of areas, piling-up indecisions, and leaving spaces of indeterminate residue.

The iconography in my work embodies life's polarities rather than its gradations, the yin and yang of our existence. I am intrigued by what is real and what is deceptive, what is manifest and what is concealed. It's the essence of riddle. Therefore, signs, symbols, and silhouettes are of great interest to me and are major elements and often serve, singularly or collectively, as the central focus of my work.

My most recent work has grown more open and airy. Nonetheless, I still have an appetite for space, a taste for detail and a tendency, generally, toward visual profusion. Now, my concern with color is for its static mass. My interest in line remains a devoted one, especially as random gestures which take the shape or form of dance.

The increased openness of my newer works remains diaristic in parts and these pieces are often tinged with compositional anxiety. I have maintained the use of some of my better established motifs and symbols to continue to express sociopolitical and spiritual concerns. Ornamentation and pattern play heavily in these newer works (2000 - 2005). These rhythmic configurations act as visual grounds of unified tonal conformity and repeated gesture. The interplay of seemingly unrelated and sometimes barely perceptible images still intrigues me. My intention behind these arrangements is to suggest multiple meanings associated with loss and regeneration. References to things quite ordinary and routine, the physical and the sub-conscious are reinforced for me in how I handle the various media. My engagement with the surface is an intimate one. On these surfaces, I allow imagery, language and medium to coexist and adhere.

My mixed media drawings exploit and employ non-conventional, as well as traditional approaches to drawing. I explore the limits and applications of various media in my mark-making and focus my attention on the role of conception in the production of the drawn image. It is from this premise that media, subject, and concept are partnered in the creative and inventive process of image making. This results in a synectic and analogical set of working strategies which guides my work and provides the linkages among the discoveries that I encounter along the way.

To me, mixed media does not necessarily limit itself to material investigation. It also permits me to function within the scope of investigating how various media connect ideas within the broader sense of linking art to life, art to matter, intellect, spirituality, social issues, and to the environment.

Each piece starts with the random selection of text torn from old, discarded books. This text serves as the springboard for generating ideas and concepts that I eventually translate into imagery. When I conceptualize a composition, that is, think about picturing an idea or ideas, I will often research art historical referents to ground those thoughts and then modify my resultant images further into new forms and features of my own creation and invention. I will also borrow and appropriate elements from our cultural past or the cultural past of other peoples as a means of paying honor and homage to all those other image makers who have preceded me.

The use of mathematical frameworks to give initial order to the picture plane is a natural inclination of mine as a painter. When combined with the accidental and happenstance of free hand drawing and mark-making, a intriguing dissonance of design results which in turn absorbs me and affects all my subsequent, compositional decisions. I continue to work this way until I sense that the piece is complete. I know a work is finished when it conveys its own sense of necessity and or inevitability.

When I revisit a work of mine that I completed sometime ago, and see it after a period of separation from its studio birth, I am enraptured by it as if I am seeing it for the first time. This is the true test and measure for me in determining whether a particular work of mine has that sense of inevitability. It displays itself as only it can. It needs no alteration, no further development, and no modification by my hand. It argues for its own existence as it is. It has moved beyond material stuff and has become art.

Biography

Jim Mroczkowski was born and raised in Windsor Ontario. He is a former resident of North Bay Ontario where he came to Nipissing University to teach in 1980. He has now returned to Windsor to work as a full-time artist after 26 years as a professor of fine arts and art education. His career in studio fine arts began with studies at the Ontario College of Art & Design and later at the University of Windsor and York University where he earned his B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees respectively. Further degree studies in art education advocacy and practice occurred at the University of Windsor (B.Ed. and M.Ed.) with additional graduate studies and research in art education theory and policy at the University of British Columbia.

His work has appeared in numerous juried exhibitions including the On View exhibition in Toronto in May 1976. Prize winners, which included his work from this provincial show, toured thirteen Ontario public galleries for the remainder of 1976 and the duration of 1977. His work also was a prizewinner in the NORART juried exhibition of 1982. In the millennium year 2000, two of his works were selected from over 3200 submissions from artists, crafts persons, designers, and architects across Canada for the Arts2000 exhibition, sponsored by the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts and the Canada Council.

Jim Mroczkowski has had numerous solo exhibitions of his work, with the most recent exhibitions occurring in Toronto in 2006 at the Spoke Club Gallery, and, in North Bay in 2004 at the Joan Ferneyhough Gallery. A major retrospective of his work occurred at the W.K.P. Kennedy Gallery in July 2001, followed by a one person exhibition at the Joan Ferneyhough Gallery in October 2001. He has shown his work both at the 1999 and 2000 Toronto International Art Fairs. He has also been the recipient of numerous merit awards and competition prizes for his work from both his alma maters and the Ontario Arts Council with exhibition grants starting in 1977 and continuing though 2004. In 1999, he was awarded one of 43 Mid-Career Artists Grants by the OAC acknowledging artists who have reached this level of public record and exhibition. In 2002, he received a Senior Artists Grant, the highest award offered to professional visual artists for their achievements and exhibition accomplishments. There were only 18 grants awarded in 2002 at the senior level.

His work can be found in many private, corporate and public collections across North America. Jim Mroczkowski has served on the Board of Directors of the White Water Gallery and the North Bay Arts Centre, now called the Capitol Centre. He was also a member of the planning commission for the White Mountain Academy of the Arts. He has provided over seventy-five public presentations in the form of workshops, seminars, lectures, demonstrations, and academic papers on a variety of art and art education topics. He has been recently appointed to the Public Art Advisory Committee for the municipality of Windsor. He is also a member of ARTCITE, Windsor's artist-run centre. Currently, he is teaching art education methodology courses as a Sessional instructor at the University of Windsor and supervising student teachers of art in the secondary schools in southwestern Ontario while painting full-time.

Grants & Awards

Recent Exhibitions

* Juried exhibitions