B I O G R A P H Y
Born in Wroclaw, Poland, Hanna's family immigrated to Eastern Passage, a small town of just over 1000 outside of Halifax in 1988. The next 10 years of her life were spent waking up to the vastness of the Atlantic ocean and the natural beauty of the East Coast. It was not until her parents moved to Toronto in 1998 that Hanna realized how radically different life was in a city. Horizon lines disappeared and were substituted by architectural giants. The change was magnificent, the visual appeal Toronto offered immediately fascinated Hanna and it did not take long for her to forget the importance of nature. Only until her last year at York University in 2009, did Hanna rekindle her awareness for Toronto's lost horizon line. Thanks to a stone carving class instructed by Laura Moore was Hanna able to further understand and develop her most recent body of work:
Artificial Horizons
Hanna Kunysz's practice deals with the destruction and reassemblage of a horizontal landscape in the metropolis by the urban building`s battle to displace man from the natural world. Artificial Horizons examines the transparency of the skyscraper building and the uncanny effects of effacing and mirroring.
The uncanny in architecture as described by Freud is a particular organization of space where everything is reduced to inside and outside and where the inside is also the outside. The reflective building as a mirror echoes Freud`s description. It serves as a space of normal binocular, three dimensional vision, modified by the flattening of depth. It reflects that which it serves to scan and erase - the sky. Here, the uncanny presents the urban building as full in weight, huge, cubic and monumental, only to become a fake wall, lost in spatial delimitation, invisible in its mirrored transparency to the sky.
By obscuring the visual anchor of the horizon line the urban building has reconstructed a new example of artificial horizons that trace the edges of buildings. Architecture has swallowed the place of horizontal fields and given instead vertical landscapes which point upwards, disrupting the ethereal world of the sky.
Kunysz composes this language of changed horizon lines and transparent buildings with bleak, sharp, geometric shapes that coexist in opposition with her organic paint spills. The methodology of pouring paint directly on the canvas disables her control of where the paint goes or how it dries, in similarity to the sky`s unrestrained meanderings around architectural faces. The sharp lines of contrast in her work celebrate the tensions between revealing and obscuration, of a sky divided by walls one cannot see over. Kunysz`s work shows buildings to be a place of visual reconstruction, where the seperation between interior and exterior cease to exist, and the buildings` relation to the natural world becomes a loosely demarcated contemporary horizon of glass and sky.