Alice Gadzinski (b.1987- d. 2018) completed her MFA at the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016 and a BFA in photography from Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 2010. Gadzinski was included in group and solo shows in Maryland and Michigan, conducted workshops at the American Visionary Art Museum, held an adjunct position at MICA, and artist-in-residences at Montgomery College (Rockville, MD), Patterson Park Charter School (Baltimore, MD), and Creative Alliance (Baltimore, MD). During her 2016 – 2018 residency at Creative Alliance, Gadzinski was awarded a LAB Grant for her Blue Poodle Collaborative Performance Project. Blue Poodle remained unfinished before her death in March 2018.
CV available upon request.
emilygadzinski@gmail.com
“My work is an unfulfillable pursuit of an “original” through an interpreting of my own definition of authenticity. I explore ideas of taste and the pressures of social performance, examining the present through past "camp" iconographies. My work strives to juxtapose beauty with artificiality, social standards with natural urges, and domestic safety with vulnerability. I am interested in the point of identity formation when childhood pretending evolves into adulthood denial. Through this questioning of façade and escapism I hope to cast a neurotic yet tongue-in-cheek light on our oftentimes-laughable adult existence.
Influenced by the aesthetic of television variety shows of the early 1960s, especially The Lawrence Welk Show (1955-1971), my work is created in a space between reality and fantasy. Each piece demonstrates a guilty pleasure in the artificial, particularly as it refers to the construction of female identity. In revealing the norm as artifice and facade, my work uses the redefinition of social obstacles as a source of empowerment.
Second-hand, found objects provide the inspiration and physical materials of my work. I rarely alter the objects I find, but am attracted to the idea of the purity of the object in contrast to the aged, discarded, and broken state in which I find them. The objects' acquired dirt, grime, and price tags represent variously a sense of delusion, incongruous hilarity, and honesty.”
Alice Gadzinski, 2017