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Traversing Lines: a Narrative on the American Landscape by Winter Rusiloski on display at the Museum of East Texas this fall. Exhibit opens to the public on August 17. All are welcome!
Aurora's Cloud by Winter Rusiloski
The Museum of East Texas is thrilled to bring Traversing Lines, an exhibit featuring works by Winter Rusiloski, to our main gallery this fall. "Winter Rusiloski is a contemporary artist based in Texas. Her work explores landscape as identity. Rusiloski has been painting landscape inspired abstractions for more than thirty years. The Big Bend of Texas desert is her primary subject which she juxtaposes with landscape influences of the northeastern United States. She has traveled extensively and incorporates landscape influences from her diverse journeys. Primarily a painter, her work also includes choreography, video art, photography, installation, drawing, performance and sculpture. She and her husband collaborate and incorporate their children into their work." Special thanks to Denise Davis for imagining and curating this exhibit for the Museum of East Texas.
Winter Rusiloski
Biography
"Winter Rusiloski was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and grew up in a rural setting outside of the city. Rusiloski earned a BFA in Painting and Related Arts-Dance at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in Painting at Texas Christian University. Rusiloski also studied abroad with the University of Georgia in Cortona, Italy, and the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, Hungary. Rusiloski joined the Baylor University Department of Art and Art History in the fall of 2016 where she serves as Associate Professor of Art. Artspace 111 in Fort Worth, Texas, and MixHaus Galley in Comfort, Texas represent her work."
Artist Statement
"My abstract paintings reference distant memories of places traversed alone and now with my family. I began painting with influences from my birthplace in northeastern Pennsylvania and transitioned as I traveled throughout the United States and Europe. Sublime landscapes inform my work of the last 25years. Being a mother of 6 children heightens the power and play through which I see the landscape. It’s vastness and the horizon combine with abstract forms, atmospheric passages, lines, and marks to suggest ideas of obstacles, barriers, and opportunities. Abstraction creates loose narratives from memories and suggestive figurative elements within a Romantic landscape.
Many works are made on the remote, untouched landscape of Terlingua Ranch, a frighteningly desolate space. Observations of our land, a forty-acre haven and blank canvas, and my family’s movement on it inform my work. My children spread out and explore, our shadows move across the desert, as we hike and play. My husband, an immigrant from Mexico, and recent attention to border issues further motivates symbolism and study in that unique region of Texas. During the pandemic I focused more tightly on existing in Big Bend, a safe place during our long period of isolation. It became a playground in an unlikely place with water holes, open spaces, and an endless canvas to work upon. Photo documentation of the space is often collaged into the paintings to introduce a varied visual vocabulary which creates another layer of mark making resulting in an ambiguous narrative. These photos often oppose nature with subjects including structures, vessels, and industrial elements, alluding back to her roots which reference the early influence of her father, an engineer.
I work on an immense and seemingly absurd scale. Gargantuan paintings, filled with powerful and gestural marks are evidence of the restlessness that plagues me and is released in the immensity of the Big Bend desert. My preoccupation with dance and movement, journeys aboard rafts leading white-water trips on turbulent rivers, and traversing the American landscape are tributaries to my aesthetic system of marks and atmospheric passages that continually allude to the distant memories of places that fill my psyche and complement my existence in the present."
*all information in quotations is from https://winter-rusiloski.com/