UCSD Open Studios: Susy Bielak

Susy Bielak

I use drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, and installation to envision ideas about personal and social relationships. My work evolves out of correspondence and collaboration with family, strangers and friends in response to the social questions I engage. Working largely with the figure, I employ gesture, the emotion of color, and sensory detail to choreograph physical and psychological space of each piece.

My current project, Fissures, includes drawings and engravings of urban and natural spaces in a state of rupture and people in the act of anticipation or remembrance.� Propelled by photographs and stories of the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake, the drawings in Fissures address the responses to the question, "What are you waiting for that you don't want to happen?� What would be your personal earthquake?"

In these drawings, unlikely objects and surfaces serve as a gateway to the past or sign of the future--speaking at once to the fallibility of memory, the impossibility of prediction, and the significance of the tangible.

The drawings include watercolors and formica engravings. The watercolors, referencing fluidity and a lack of ground, are painted with water from relevant sites.� The formica engravings, in patterns emulating nature, speak to an unsustainable built environment.

susybielak.com

Susy Bielak

Artists