Mardi Nowak

Fox Galleries is proud to present Curating You by Mardi Nowak.

Mardi Nowak is a Melbourne based artist and curator and is currently the Director of the National Exhibitions Touring Support (NETS Victoria).

Curating You continues Nowak’s ongoing investigation of translating paper-based collage into woven tapestry. There is a disjunction between the two media; collage is fast and immediate, tapestry slow and technical. Nowak has created a work methodology where a small paper-based collage is then enlarged via large scale copying and then translated into tapestry form. She works across the original image, photocopy and now, digital images – taking imperfections and elements from all into the final work.

The source of the collage fragments is often fashion magazines, combined with personal photos taken via iphone. We view an ongoing stream of images and information instructing us how we should live our life. From ‘curating’ in Pinterest, magazine articles instructing how to create your perfect room to apps to make our selfies look better – Nowak is curious of how we show our real self in a time poor society. Nowak enjoys the contradiction of translating a perfect airbrushed image into a more pixelated tapestry version. Transferring flat and smooth into textured cloth, these contradictions aim to question our sense of self as we navigate the modern world today.

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