How to Let Go, Winston Chmielinski

About

Chmielinski’s intuitive process, one that begins with digital and physical collaging, has carried over into surface experimentation: he combines printing techniques with mixed media, and cuts and sews his own paintings back into newly charged arrangements. In order to sublimate a multitude of divergent references and images, Chmielinski repeats this process until his compositions feel free from the narrative structures of his source images, folding impressions out of generative juxtapositions.

As a result, Chmielinski’s paintings oscillate between the meticulous and impressionistic, reflective of one another in surface rather than subject, in brushstrokes rather than in forms. Some paintings are hung in pairs to further sound out this polyphony of edges where they meet in unexpected harmonies.

Chmielinski also presents a two-channel video, “Duets”, in which he and his sister interrupt themselves with outbursts of singing while interviewing their parents. The random parameter of having to hum along to whatever sound plays through their earbuds brings all four characters out of their heads and into effusions of honest emotion and language.

The installation in the gallery’s back room alludes to Chmielinski’s ongoing collection (and dispossession) of source material, literally depicted in a near life-size photo of fabrics that have since been alchemized into the other elements positioned around the room.

“How to Let Go” is as much a visual collusion of boundaries, between paintings, objects, and narratives, as it is a palpable philosophy of reintegration. Continually opening up his process to chance, Chmielinski reflects on fragmentation as a state of possibility rather than chaos, and on the potential to endlessly build bridges where before there were only gaps.