BIO
Susan Kordalewski holds an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art (London, UK) and a BFA from Concordia University (Montréal, Canada). Her work has been exhibited in North America and Europe and is represented in private and public collections. In 2011, she was shortlisted for the Art Gallery of York University’s Artists’ Book award. Space vs. Place, an installation of her work at Gallery 44, was a featured exhibition in the 2011 Contact Photography Festival in Toronto. In 2012 her work was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, UK) in a performance work curated by Am Nuden Da. Recent solo shows include This Will Also Change at Sporobole Centre en Art Actuel in 2012, and In Relation at Centre3 in 2014.
Born 1984, Canada
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STATEMENT
Susan Kordalewski is a Canadian-born and UK-trained artist whose practice ruminates on identity and the archive of the self. Placing emphasis on both formal and conceptual attributes, Kordalewski’s work is largely autobiographical. Driven by a desire to contain, categorize, represent, and summarize experience and emotion, her work demonstrates an almost obsessive need to resolve some concrete truth.
Working between two artistic modes, one leaning towards a semiotic reading, looking for messages, and one leaning towards formal experience, relative to embodiment, Kordalewski integrates both as if inseparable. She relies on the formal qualities of each media, the flatness and inherent deadness of the photograph, or the mechanized reproduction of a print, to expand on and draw out the complexities of each work.
Kordalwewski’s diaristic practice points to the nonlinearity of experience and meaning, while simultaneously moving past the questions,”What, how, where and why does it mean?” to explore what we feel compelled to do with meaning, at the most intimate and personal level.