About
Audra Wolowiec is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York whose work oscillates between installation, print, sculpture and performance with an emphasis on sound and the material qualities of language. She is interested in how sound can create spaces of listening and connection.
Wolowiec’s sound installations and experimental language scores often use the gap, space, or breath in between speech to amplify an undercurrent of language. These deconstructed language-based artworks extend from the embodied experience of her own dysfluent speech, and draw from the traditions of music notation, experimental writing, and visual poetry. The scores exist as an invitation for others to read or perform, presenting new channels of interpretation and collaboration.
Wolowiec's work has been shown internationally and in the United States at MASS MoCA, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, ICA at MECA (Maine College of Art), Stony Brook University, Print Center New York, and Art in General. Readings and events have taken place at The Poetry Project, Microscope Gallery, and Center for Performance Research. Her work has been featured in Artforum, BOMB Magazine, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, CAA Journal, Modern Painters, and Sound American. Residencies include Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Complex Systems Art and Physics Residency at the University of Oregon supported by a National Science Foundation Grant, Dieu Donné, Institute for Electronic Arts (iea) at Alfred University. Wolowiec is currently an Artist Fellow at the New York Public Library Picture Collection investigating how sound is contained in images.
Wolowiec currently teaches at Parsons School of Design and directs the publishing platform Gravel Projects.
GRAVEL PROJECTS
Gravel Projects is a publishing platform that activates the aggregates produced at the interstices of sound and language. Founded and directed by Audra Wolowiec.
PEDAGOGY
Assistant Professor, Part-time, Parsons School of Design, New York City, NY
Visiting Lecturer, SUNY Purchase, Purchase, NY
Visiting Lecturer, MFA, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY
Artist Educator, Dia:Beacon, Beacon, NY
Artist Educator, MoMA Studio, New York, NY
CONTACT
audrawolowiec (at) gmail (dot) com
If the surface of a painting is analogous to a retina, the surface of a print is closer to an eardrum (a membrane that senses vibrations coming from all directions). Perhaps the best way to put this is to say that a print, unlike a painting, can sense things that come from behind it. Audra Wolowiec’s cast concrete relief works, based on the structure of acoustic tiles, emphasize this by exploring the multidirectional quality of the surfaces that are necessary for the capture of sound. And her waveforms, which she made while in residence at Dieu Donné paper mill after watching pulp moving in vats and screens, reveal that paper itself is born from an immersive field of vibration—from an aqueous surround.
—Jennifer L. Roberts, Listening to Print, Visual Record: The Materiality of Sound, Print Center New York, 2023
Speaking is an embodied experience; the connection is intimate and inextricable. The physicality of being a dysfluent speaker, working through a block, gap, or repetition, involves the entire body. When the flow of speech is disrupted, we listen in new ways.
—An Address to Absence: Audra Wolowiec interviewed by Meg Whiteford, BOMB Magazine, 2022
On the Southern Coast of England three monolithic cement ‘listening ears’ from the early 1900s stand like sentinels surveying the sea. These remnants of technology succinctly reveal the relationship between sound and power, sound and transformation, and sound and public space. Audra Wolowiec’s work is inspired by these acoustic mirrors. Cast from concrete, they consider the physicality of sound.
—Julie Poitras Santos, Acoustic Resonance, ICA at MECA (Maine College of Art), 2020
Reassembled fragments of texts and vocalizations invite audiences into the immersive installations of these two artists.
—Artists on Artists: Ann Hamilton and Audra Wolowiec, BOMB Magazine, 2018
Much of Wolowiec’s work is about what isn’t there. Or, more to the point, the elements that are endowed with shape, surface, and weight often function as delivery systems for those that are not, literally or metaphorically. Sound waves, light beams, and elided texts define the core of her practice.
—Thomas Micchelli, What Isn't There: Audra Wolowiec's Sounds, Scents, Erasures, Hyperallergic, 2016
The results do not point at the results—they are rich process and rhythm cues, evidence that language is audible even in its silence, and visible in the margin and spaces of its arranging and rearranging. Wolowiec is not presenting conclusions. She is inviting the viewer to investigate the ineffable.
—Audra Wolowiec by Emmalea Russo, BOMB Magazine, 2016
The page becomes a destination, a portal, and a place of encounter.
—College Art Association (CAA) Art Journal Open, Critical Bibliographies: Poetics of Sound and Language, 2016 (DOWNLOAD PDF)
The idea of connection, or more properly, a fading connection, runs through Audra Wolowiec’s work like an unpredictable electric current. There is an empathy to her work that seeks to create an elusive but shared experience. Here, conceptual mediates perceptual art, an art of phenomena and trace effect. Were she able to press up against each viewer and bask in that shared heat— might that be enough? I don’t think so. Wolowiec is also, perhaps to her chagrin, a documentarian and image maker. Sensation is strongly linked to the visual, and she crafts images and objects with humor and clarity. Wolowiec deals with conditions so tentative, so fraught with the potential for dissolution, that the very voice she is coaxing out (her own? the artist’s voice?) shifts the burden of ‘making meaning’ to the viewer. Not an abdication of responsibility, but a generosity, giving us enough means with which to continue the search. And exhalation of breath, to get the sails moving. It is how we begin to have an effect on the tides, the skies, the horizon.
—Michael Oatman, RISD Sculpture