You have just a few more days to catch a wonderful exhibition at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, featuring the work of Carolyn Świszcz and Natasha Pestich. Both artists received the McKnight Printmaking Fellowship, and while they weren’t chosen specifically to create work that bears relationship with each other, the exhibition rings of a nice conversation between the two artists’ bodies of work.
For one thing, I kept thinking about notions of the “American Dream” as I wandered through the show. In the Bill of Rights, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that in the new country citizens would have inalienable rights of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It sounds cool, except as originally conceived civil rights were intended for white men who happened to own land. So, it’s no surprise that even today, one of the facets pegged in our American imagination to making it in this country is owning things— specifically a house, a car, and other expensive objects.
Pestich, for her part, populates the show with many house frames, all colored in different shades of blue. In some cases we’ll see the frame of a house, printed in white with a blue background, and in other cases, she’ll depict just one part of a house, like a door, a window, or a rooftop.
Pestich told me part of her inspiration was her experience with her mom’s foreclosure.
“This was just before I was headed to college,” she tells me. “It was a moment in my life that has, in so many ways, defined my perspective.”
It’s not the first time Pestich has dealt with experience in her work— she investigated this topic in graduate school. It also follows a theme she’s returned to often— that of loss and disappearance, and how to take agency in systems that work against you.
Pestich also references the lottery and gambling in a number of the pieces. One series of architectural pieces is titled “Lakeside Lottery.” Another work, which looks a bit like an ornate window, is made up of small circles, with the letters that make up the word “POWER” spelled out, as if the circles were lottery tokens. She names another piece, “Your Best Bet,” and one “Property Ladder.”
In the work, the lottery becomes a metaphor for predatory lending, where a desire for a better life results in a terrible loss. Pestich’s mother had been a waitress, and in a desperate point in her life, needed to have something that was her own. But a shady lending deal led to her ultimately losing her house. “I think I have a lot of shame still, or embarrassment about it,” Pestich says. “ I don’t even understand exactly legally, like how that happened.”
At the same time, the work seems to assert a sense of agency for Pestich’s immigrant parents and for herself. “I wanted it to be not just a memorial or mourning of something that’s passed, but a reminder that we need to work together to create change where we want to create change.”
Carolyn Świszcz’s prints in the exhibition also incorporate buildings— gas stations, an Aldi store, interior scenes inside a home, and also roads traversing through nature. Świszcz lives in a first-ring suburb in West St. Paul, and draws from what she sees everyday.
In some cases, she’s actually making art about things she despises. “I thought I would try to paint the ugliest thing I could think of which is this gas station down the street, this convenience store, which has just about every conceivable word in its facade,” she tells me. “It’s just really hideous.”
When she paints things she doesn’t like, it’s a way to be okay with it, Świszcz says. “It kind of goes through a transformation.” To her gas station portrait, she adds a paper squirrel she had made for a parade. She calls it a self portrait. “It was sort of this idea of like, moving through a space that is somewhat joyless and trying to bring this other feeling of lightness with you.”
With so many of Świszcz’s pieces, she’s taking scenes from everyday life: a drive in the car, a visit to the grocery store, a person watering their lawn. And yet these prints are spiked with color, bold angles, extreme perspectives and intense energy. It’s as if you’re viewing the suburban ordinariness through Świszcz ecstatic imagination.
To me, Świszcz’s work relates to Pestich’s in their quiet rebellion. We are told to conform to the trappings of American normalcy and we often do. But how can we defy those expectations, even through our own thoughts, our own hopes? The work in the exhibition offers a few ways to do that.
The 2023 McKnight Printmaking Fellowship Exhibition runs through April 26. The hours on weekdays are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. More information here. Another exhibition on view, called “Reflected Impressions, Endless Possibilities” runs through June 28. More information here.
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at sregan@minnpost.com.
