ABOUT JOANNE UNGAR
Joanne Ungar is originally from Minneapolis. After several years of liberal arts studies at Oberlin College in Ohio, she moved to New York City, where she earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, focusing on collage. She began employing waxes as her main collage agent, after exploring and working with shellac, resins and acrylic mediums. Since the mid 1990’s, waxes and encaustic have been her main medium. Her wax “recipe” is a work-in-progress: she is often tinkering with it to get the desired lucidity and luminosity for whatever she happens to be burying or revealing in her layers of wax.
Joanne was awarded a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in 2017. She lives on the Lower East side of Manhattan with her husband and their 2 cats, and maintains her long-time art studio in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.
Joanne Ungar Artist Statement
My current work utilizes recycled cardboard, sandwiched within layers of pigmented encaustic. Underpinning this work is my interest in consumerism and its accompanying waste, packaging. Packaging is not only the refuse of consumerism, but the wrapping of it, too. (say more here about advertising and misrepresentation and feminism). Its physicality is malleable, yet always recognizable, offering many modes of presentation. And like one of my earlier obsessions, bubble wrap, it contains an inherent tension between the organic and the geometric as it begins to break down after being subjected to various processes, with wisps or hints of corrugation often the last recognizable clue to what I’ve done. On a less concrete level, the double entendre of “packaging” allows me to re-present, (or re-package) these scraps, creating mementos and embalming them to function as time-capsule-like objects, possible future reminders of how casually careless we were with our only earth. The imagery the finished pieces imply is elusive and subjective, but often they evoke dystopian landscapes or ill-defined blueprints of submerged abstract structures. Many things mechanical and/or scientific are suggested, but too elusive to grasp, a metaphor for our current societal argument with factual/scientific knowledge.
In this group of work, I’m incorporating several new techniques and ideas, including: packaging that has inherent negative spaces resulting from the die-cutting process; hand-made relief collages, offering a variety of surfaces, materials and images; and relief carvings of the wood substrate. These new elements and geometries introduce a complex visual language beyond the “box,” and encourage a vibrant dialog between individual pieces as they are grouped together.