Review

"Ojczyzna/Orgod," Relief Print.

Monika Meler
Contain/Retain

11 a.m.-2 p.m.

Cocoon Gallery at the Arts Incubator
115 W. 18th St.
Kansas City, MO
816.421.2292

Hours: 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday, 4:30-7 p.m. Thursday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday, noon-4 p.m. Saturday.
Runs through: July 23.

Artist's site: http://www.monikameler.com
Gallery site: http://www.artsincubatorkc.org

Most "flat art" is designed to be placed against a wall and seen from only one side.

There's a reason, though, that Monika Meler's prints hang in space at the Arts Incubator's Cocoon Gallery, where her show Contain/Retain is on display through the end of this week. They need to be seen from both sides — preferably with light coming through them from the front window — to be fully appreciated.

Meler's works — such as Ojczyzna/Orgod, today's featured image — are really to be looked into rather than at. They reveal not only a wealth of color and line, but also a collection of repeating motifs both elusive and familiar. Consequently, seeing them carries an air of memory as well as of discovery.

Seeing life from both sides is an integral part of Meler's own narrative as well as her art. She was born on the other side of a barrier between East and West: the Iron Curtain, which divided a continent not only physically — with guard towers, checkpoints and barbed wire — but politically and artistically as well.

Having been born and raised in Brodnica, Poland in the 1980’s, I am a product of a tension between Eastern and Western Europe and my art is a testament to and a re-examination of my memories of this time, she writes.  At the age of ten, a year before Poland’s “Solidarity” movement succeeded, my family and I immigrated to Chicago. Although Chicago has a thriving Polish community, it was clear to me growing up that every Pole was trying to shed aspects of their past. I truly missed Poland, and as a child, I did not realize how Communism affected the landscape and the Poland that I desperately clung to. I lived in the United States without returning to my home country for fourteen uninterrupted years, and in this time Poland’s political and economic situation changed drastically.

Then she went back:

During my first visit to Poland after the fourteen-year absence, the spaces and landscape that I occupied as a child changed significantly. These changes made me realize that the existence of some places and events were purely fictional and invented. Yet this did not matter because no matter how much I looked at these actual places, I could only remember them the way that they had existed in my mind. The image of Brodnica that exists in my memory is so strongly engraved, it can never be replaced by actuality; my memory is my reality. The house in which I grew up was recently painted pink by the new owners, yet it will always be the yellow that I remember from my childhood. The road that led to my home had been paved in my absence, yet every time I think of it my mind remembers the unpaved road. My work explores the invented landscapes and events that are components of these cherished memories of my childhood.

And because Meler's memories are not one-sided and two-dimensional, she doesn't want her shows to be, either.

My prints, drawings, and installations invite viewers to be in, look upon, and explore these spaces and events that exist in my mind, she explains. I often combine installation with printmaking because it is important for me to re-contextualize the art of the print.

New and changing perspectives are always rewarding in art. In the case of Meler's work, a literal change of perspective (from the viewer's standpoint) pays handsome dividends, too.

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