On the Back of a Swan
Nyssa Komorowski, Emergence of new faces while oldest medicines sprout all over and the mother seedpod rockets down to earth, 2022, digital illustration. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Nyssa Komorowski
Project Room
March 4–May 10, 2025
Opening Reception: March 1, 3pm
Artist Talk: April 15, 6pm, Zoom (RSVP)
ARTIST STATEMENT
On the Back of a Swan transforms the Project Room into a virtual Sky Dome wherein the land is seen and experienced as a projection from the inside out, suspended mid-fall from Sky to Earth.
A Sky Dome is a model of the cosmos in Haudenosaunee traditions that describes the story of Sky Woman’s fall from Sky World and the creation of Turtle Island. The narrative imagery I draw refers to my own experiences, thoughts, and feelings, but my visual language responds to Indigenous stories and culture with which I’m familiar from my Oneida and urban Indigenous background. Within, I articulate the creation of my ‘own world’, analogous to the creation of Turtle Island, a place created by and for Sky Woman after she was uprooted from the world she knew and plunged down to an alien sea. In this way, Haudenosaunee cosmology opens opportunities for self-knowledge and reorganization of the inner self’s relationship to the world.
In this installation, gigantic black and white drawings are pasted and inked on the walls. These depict myself in the iconic role of Sky Woman, as I float through the air and land in a garden-like setting. Colourful digital illustrations are projected on top of these drawings—landscapes filled with communities of plants and creatures, amongst other radiant visions—which continually alternate, allowing various permutations of narrative to emerge from chance juxtapositions of imagery.
Nyssa Komorowski is a Toronto-based artist who creates illustrations, installations, artist books, and music. She substantively creates her own world, and invites others in. By incorporating material inherited from many different sources into her work, she explores notions of the self in relation to the world, and the interplay between the shadow self and the "good mind". Working both on paper and in digital media, her illustrations are black and white, monochrome, as well as riotously colourful. In her immersive installations she uses video and projections alongside physical media, playing with movement vs stillness, sound vs silence, and light vs darkness as affective forms of transcendental media. She is an experienced book and zine maker, and has produced colour ink from materials harvested directly from the land using historical recipes. Currently, she is exploring the use of movement in her illustration work by animating her drawn characters and environments, and is experimenting with incorporating her music, performed as SOUSOU sings, into her installation art and animations.
THANKS + ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
From Nyssa Komorowski:
Thank you Paula, and all the other Knitwits. Thank you Megan Yetman for our wonderful experience putting Patterns Magazine together, invaluable to this exhibition.
From Union Gallery:
Union Gallery extends sincere thanks to the Provost's Advisory Committee on the Promotion of the Arts at Queen's University for supporting On the Back of a Swan through the George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund.