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, 2025
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
Nyssa Komorowski is an artist and PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto in Art History, specializing in Book History and Print Culture. Her research investigates the image culture of land and the geographical imagination of North Americans from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is also interested in relationships to land and locality, relationships to distant lands by geographical dreaming, critique of the concept of wilderness, contemporary Indigenous art, and takes a special interest in the creative work and philosophies of women. As a visual artist, Nyssa makes illustrations that draw from her personal experiences and philosophies about making relationships with the land and natural world. Her BFA was completed at OCAD University in Cross-Disciplinary Art specializing in Publications, and she completed a certificate program specializing in dark room photography processes at Haliburton School of the Arts. She also earned an advanced degree in Art at Fanshawe College. Today she seeks ways to incorporate creative praxis into her academic projects, to make opportunities for visually engaged and tactile learning.
THANKS + ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
From Nyssa Komorowski:
Thank you Paula, and all the other Knitwits.
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.