Man on Wire

source: highlike

Statement: Painting MFA candidate Ronna Nemitz says she’s noticed art themes trending toward contemporary social causes. While she recognizes and appreciates this choice in other artists’ work, Nemitz says it’s not for her. To Nemitz, the links between art and life are less direct, so she focuses on emotions and materials and not today’s hot topics. “I think [sustainability] is kind of the main entrée right now. It’s the main thing everybody’s doing,” she says. “I’m not saying artists shouldn’t tackle [environmental issues and causes], but there are a lot more direct avenues for that that aren’t me doing a sculpture about it.” All produced art is filtered through its artist, she adds, and to treat certain themes just because they are “fashionable” and will elicit an immediate response can come off as “kind of arrogant, sometimes.” “I think art happens, regardless of social causes,” Nemitz says. “I think it’s detrimental to say art must have an angle of social awareness. And I think it’s a burden on artists, to say your art has to have that angle of social awareness.“
Photographer: Joshua White
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source: sosuperawesome

The Pull of Gravity explores ideas of suspension, tension, and isolation through an on going narrative. Amplified and exaggerated moments are suspended in prolonged tension and isolation, pinpointing moments of transition. Truncated limbs replace entire figures. With the impending movement halted, the ephemeral nature of experience is momentarily arrested and able to be examined.

Everyone experiences some form of these moments in their lives and it is my attempt to make something physical that represents the complex and contradictory emotions involved in life’s transitions. Personal meaning takes shape out of these moments. We are the sum of our life’s transitions.
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source: ronnanemitz

In my work I try to define my experience. I always thought memory was my subject but more essential than insistent, specific memory, is time. It crawls forward and backward and we are forever in its grip, suspended between our experience and our inexperience. I try to reconcile my experience with ideas of the future and the present. It is this tension between what was/what is and what we know and don’t know that interests me. All relationships come back to what we know and don’t know – about other cultures, other lands, and about the person sitting across from you, even about yourself. Painting is way to get to know oneself. A great deal of my work talks about emotional spaces – in between states. Relations fraught with tension: homesickness, loneliness, indecision, and vulnerability. Time is constant and indifferent to us. Time is not running out, we are running out, at once becoming large with experience and smaller with lifespan. The great pain of living is the awareness that we will lose everything, eventually, even our own lives. As we struggle to shape it, reorder it, shorten it, lengthen it, and, finally try to arrest it, time resists all of our attentions. But, we still try because that is the work, to bear the unbearable. To rest, suspended between what we know and what we don’t.