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 is represented by the Front Room Gallery in New York City. 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.
Statement
Consumerism and its accompanying byproducts, packaging and disillusionment, form the basis for this work. Packaging is not only the refuse of consumerism, but its wrapping, too. The advertising business, rampant in all aspects of our lives, wraps its most base truth (that we need MORE), in glossy, retouched images that are impossible to achieve. I’m working with this idea of “wrapping,” and its accompanying disillusionment. By my beautifying and re-wrapping this packaging, the viewer can look at this conundrum from a different perspective, find some real beauty, and, I hope, think about the state of our world.
Cardboard 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 of the finished pieces is elusive and subjective, but often they evoke dystopian landscapes or ill-defined blueprints of submerged architctural structures. All things mechanical and/or scientific are suggested, but remain too elusive to grasp, a metaphor for our current societal argument with fact-based and scientific knowledge.
As always, process is at the root of my work. Transformation means process. As I transform these pieces from boxes to art-objects, I embrace the process, knowing it’s not really controllable, that it’s in charge of the alchemy, and I’m not. It’s this process that engages me and that dictates the outcome.
©️ Joanne Ungar 2023.