Bio
Justyna Dawidowicz is a contemporary landscape artist currently based in Ottawa, Canada. After leaving her native Poland in 1994, Justyna moved to Montreal where she obtained a bachelor in Fine Arts at Concordia University, specializing in Painting and Drawing. She exhibited in Montreal galleries such as Belgo, Art Mur and VAV gallery. In 2013 Justyna moved to Brooklyn, New York where she developed her current series, Fragmented Landscapes, at a Brooklyn Navy Yard studio. This new series was a move away from realism towards more abstract and process based work and the series was honoured with the Best Regional Artist Award from the Ottawa Art Gallery in 2017.
Aside from working on her own art, Justyna has been spreading the love of art-making in diverse healthcare settings. Between 2008 and 2013, Justyna worked at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, engaging people in art and curating patient art exhibitions. Here Justyna became inspired by Outsider Art and developed an interest in process-based art-making. From 2014-2016 Justyna worked as an Artist in Residence at an oncology unit at the Mount Sinai West Hospital in New York.
Artist Statement
Fragmented landscapes
This body of work is inspired by the Canadian landscape. Each piece is unique where the direction is a balance between the accidental nature of the free flowing ink and the artist’s ability to control the medium. This balance is mirrored in the relationship between the land and the human, the tension between human efforts to tame and control nature and nature's persistent regeneration to reclaim its territory.
With these paintings I aim to bring attention to nature, its beauty and how it can be restructured and contaminated by human activity. The shapes evoke those of rocks, mountains, and cliffs while the colors evoke the ocean, sky and wind. Each image is isolated in the middle of a large, blank background to give it a sense of preciousness, like pieces of the Earth floating in space, perhaps a remote vision of an idyllic past, dimly remembered in a future world marred by ecological disaster.