Art Spiel | Monika Drożyńska: Resistance Embroiderer
Monika Drożyńska: Resistance Embroiderer
Michele Jaslow
May 3, 2024
Polish artist Monika Drożyńska brings her resistance embroidery to a New York audience in a solo show at Open Source Gallery and her Urban Embroidery project. The connections she makes with words within many different languages are a dexterous game of text and symbols on fabric, an adept study of transformative change for a better world. Polish curator Bartek Remisko, speaking about the work, said, “Embroidery can be about threads that bring us together to create social change.” Remisko’s insight speaks to Drożyńska’s focus on embroidery techniques in contemporary art and textiles in public spaces to further the collective conversation and play with conventional expectations.
As a visual artist and embroiderer activist with a PhD in Fine Art from the Academy of Fine Arts, Krakow, Poland, Drożyńska‘s work starts and ends with her interest in language. When sharing insight into her approach, she references the Walter Benjamin quote, “It is the translator’s task to release in his language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.” Her resources consist of thoughts she finds in varied places in many languages. No source is too refined or rudimentary. She begins each work with an open mind to translate what she sees, stringing together these found thoughts into new collective stories. In this work for a New York audience, she also pulls from Polish and American history, from past tragedies to complex current events. Read More
