Nicole Anona Banowetz

OpenART 2017 Orebro Sweden

The forms in Outbreak are based on microscopic bacteria and viruses. These forms are beautiful and complex yet menacing as they replicate and fly along the building, seeming to escape into the world. All at once they are playful and frightening, decorative and destructive, delicate and diseased.  One bacteria which inspired the work is the stomach bacteria Helicobacter pylori. If Helicobacter pylori is present in your gut as a younger person it cause ulcers, but as we grow older it helps to prevent stomach cancer.  At one point doctors were treating patients to help relieve ulcers by removing the bacteria and suddenly a few years later there was a dramatic rise in stomach cancer cases.  This one bacteria demonstrates our complex relationships with the natural world.  No situation is ever completely black or white, good or bad.  We must address all situations with a more complex kind of thinking where we embrace the many complexities of one situation. 

photo credits Richard Romero

Distended Defense

A Deimatic behaviour

Where predators are initially startled but learn to eat the displaying prey, the display is classed as deimatic, and the prey is bluffing.

Deimatic behaviour in animals means any pattern of threatening or startling behaviour, such as suddenly displaying conspicuous eyespots, so as to scare off or momentarily distract a predator, thus giving the prey animal an opportunity to escape.

Rotifers are fascinating creatures; evolutionary mysteries that survive through endurance and adaptations.

When the rotifer is attacked by predatory fungus it dries up and is carried away in the wind to a new environment.  When the rotifer dries up it shatters it’s DNA allowing it to pick up DNA from it’s surroundings.

My creatures collapse and dry up, allowing them to fly away.

This piece was created for the Amsterdam Light Festival.

It is a part of the Amsterdam Light Art Collection.

In her installation for the Center for Creative Activities in Ustka Nicole presents forms based on microscopic single celled sea creatures, radiolaria. In a large inflated scale these animals feel surreal, almost alien, and even frightening.  They are alive, and pulsing with air.  On the night of the opening they feel strong, showing only hints of their weakness.  Slowly the large robust forms are infested with delicate porcelain pieces.  These fragile, beautiful and slightly disgusting forms inhabit and weaken the forms in the days following the opening. 

Embrace.  Installed in the Kreuzberg Pavillon as part of the Heavy Petting series.  

The sculpture surrenders to the viewers embrace allowing them to sink slightly into the form. All at once the sculpture collapses and supports like an inviting yet unsettling pillow.

Up to now art history can only scarcely read the influence of touched artistic work. Traditionally the visitors of an exhibition are obliged to restrain themselves respectfully from the artworks in order to recognize themselves, in a diligent visually refined way, as a plain observer of the art. On one hand as spectator one may be touched by the impression of a picture, on the other hand the artwork must be conserved and shielded from any possible touch. The spaces administering this state are bourgeois. Art you can touch is being declared a museum-pedagogical work for those who are still to be taught the right way of seeing.

The Heavy Petting Gallery instead is a place where the direct physical contact with the artistic work not only takes place but shall be actively encouraged.

Thereby the Heavy Petting Gallery is acting neither didactical nor charitable. It does not declare the negligence of visibility a distress that shall be relieved but, as a project space, campaigns for new forms of artistic work and their emancipation.

КОРАБЛЬ: ВНУТРЕННИЙ ПРОСТОР

Vessel:   A work in progress presented in Kronstadt, Russia.

When I looked at images of Kronstadt I imagined a form; half ship, and half sea creature.  This form exists somewhere between machine and animal.  The deflated white ghost like skin of this form sits nestled among the ruins of the forts and shipyards, inviting the viewer to enter.  I want the viewer to enter into the skin of the form, physically stepping into the creature.  While inside the creature the outside world disappears and the viewer is enveloped in white.  This void separates them from the landscape and the history of the island.  The space is complexly disorienting, calm, and absent.   The viewer is filled with the awe of such a disorienting space.

Vessel, presented to the city of Kronstadt in a public event after the completion of my one month artist in residency.

This project was made possible by the artist in residency program awarded by the

NCCA The National Centre for Contemporary Arts.

The surreal landscape pulses with struggle:  my erupture is bursting, spilling, vomiting, and disintegrating.  Debris is scattered across the landscape: spilled from split and bursting forms, but the process and the purpose is unclear. 

The forms are inspired by microscopic images of nature.  A variety of enlarged parasitic fungus and other plant life are present.  These fungus must harm other plants to survive, bursting open to release their spores.  This seemingly violent action is a necessary part of their life-cycle.

The arrangement recalls dioramas from natural history museums, with large groupings of forms stretching along the edges of the gallery.

The environment reveals an unexpected intimacy, exposing it’s interior through transparent portals.  This delicate space feels calmer, more comforting, yet disorienting.  This space reveals the artists’ hand, the delicate seams and air channels in view.  There is a shared vulnerability between the artist, the viewer and the landscape.

This installation was shown as part of the Arvada Center's Unbound: 5 installations.  

The surreal landscape pulses with struggle:  my erupture is bursting, spilling, vomiting, and disintegrating.  Debris is scattered across the landscape: spilled from split and bursting forms, but the process and the purpose is unclear. 

The forms are inspired by microscopic images of nature.  A variety of enlarged parasitic fungus and other plant life are present.  These fungus must harm other plants to survive, bursting open to release their spores.  This seemingly violent action is a necessary part of their life-cycle.

The arrangement recalls dioramas from natural history museums, with large groupings of forms stretching along the edges of the gallery.

The environment reveals an unexpected intimacy, exposing it’s interior through transparent portals.  This delicate space feels calmer, more comforting, yet disorienting.  This space reveals the artists’ hand, the delicate seams and air channels in view.  There is a shared vulnerability between the artist, the viewer and the landscape.

This installation was shown as part of the Arvada Center's Unbound: 5 installations.  

The surreal landscape pulses with struggle:  my erupture is bursting, spilling, vomiting, and disintegrating.  Debris is scattered across the landscape: spilled from split and bursting forms, but the process and the purpose is unclear. 

The forms are inspired by microscopic images of nature.  A variety of enlarged parasitic fungus and other plant life are present.  These fungus must harm other plants to survive, bursting open to release their spores.  This seemingly violent action is a necessary part of their life-cycle.

The arrangement recalls dioramas from natural history museums, with large groupings of forms stretching along the edges of the gallery.

The environment reveals an unexpected intimacy, exposing it’s interior through transparent portals.  This delicate space feels calmer, more comforting, yet disorienting.  This space reveals the artists’ hand, the delicate seams and air channels in view.  There is a shared vulnerability between the artist, the viewer and the landscape.

This installation was shown as part of the Arvada Center's Unbound: 5 installations.  

Displayed at the Museum of Outdoor Arts, 2014.  

Contagion is swelling, growing, filling, inflating, and spilling through the gallery.  The work literally expands with air- threatening to burst.  The forms are based on microscopic bacteria and viruses.   These forms are beautiful and complex yet menacing as they replicate and invade the gallery, trying to escape through the windows.  All at once they are playful and frightening, decorative and destructive, delicate and diseased.   The energy of the sculpture grows along the walls, struggling to escape but ending abruptly at the glass window, hitting it, and sliding to the ground.  This violent movement contrasts the stillness in the center of the gallery, where two forms sit quiet and separate from the rest.  These forms are infected.  Growths burst upward from the dead forms in a silent cycle of collapse and growth.

Photo credits Richard Romero

Displayed as part of the First Draft exhibit for the Biennial of the Americas, 2013.  Civic Center Park.  Denver CO.  

The gallery was transformed into a stable of sewn horses, inflating and deflating against the weight of bridles and ties. These binding features pinched, puckered and deformed the struggling horse forms. Through this work the artist discussed vulnerability and the challenges faced in overcoming it.