FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SCOTT WOLNIAK Tamed and Wild: new drawing and video

January 12– February 24, 2007
Opening Reception: Friday, January 12 from 6-9 pm
Gallery Hours: Wednesday- Saturday 11am-5 pm
TONY WIGHT / BODYBUILDER & SPORTSMAN Gallery
119 N. Peoria St. Chicago IL 60607
Tel. 312-492-7261 Fax.312-492-6796 info@bodybuilderandsportsman.com Contact: Tony Wight
Press and photographic material available upon request.

TONY WIGHT / BODYBUILDER & SPORTSMAN Gallery is pleased to announce Tamed and Wild: drawing and video, an exhibition of new projected video and recent drawings by Chicago based artist Scott Wolniak. This will be Wolniak’s second solo showing at Tony Wight / Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery.

Scott Wolniak's new work explores ideas of the natural world (or "the wild") as a metaphor for expressionism and technology run amok. Abstraction serves for Wolniak as a critique of expressive abandon, be it in the studio or on a jet ski.

The Pond Calling to the Ocean is a hand-drawn, digitally animated video that creates a shifting vision of reflective, lapping water. The waves are a rhythmically structured meditation that progresses through increasingly frenetic, layered space, eventually reaching an impressionistic white noise crescendo that echoes the visual complexities of its source. The video is comprised of several thousand drawings done in watercolor, ash, melted snow and pond water. The looseness with which these pages were drawn is undercut by the mechanical repetition of the animation process. The sound and image of moving water functions as a suggestive vehicle for time and space travel, as well as murky implications of universalism and environmental progressivism.

Six framed drawings --a seagull, a bottlenose dolphin, the sea, the sky, the horizon, dirt and Roy Horn's white tiger Montecore-- provide a counterpoint of containment and familiarity to the sprawling abstract projection. These deal with similar conceptual terrain but provide a more semiotic tone. Stark structuralist gesture is pitted against aspects of decorative art, entertainment, new age illumination, and tourism thereby creating images that purposefully collapse into flimsy self-conscious contemplation.

Scott Wolniak’s solo exhibitions include Scott Wolniak: 12x12 New Artist/New Work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2005), Video and Sculpture at Tony Wight / Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery Project Space (2005), New Ghosts at mn Gallery (2003), and Time and Space in the Gahlberg Gallery at McAninch Arts Center, College of DuPage (2003). Group exhibitions include: Takeover, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago (2006); Perpetual Art Machine, Scope Art Fair, New York (2006); The Buddy Cycles, Western Exhibitions (2006); Into the Woods, Thomas McCormick Gallery, Chicago (2005); RED WHITE BLUE, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York (2005). Wolniak received his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995 and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2002.