November 12, 2024
Audra Wolowiec is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York who works 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 locate the gap, space, or breath in between speech to mine an undercurrent of language. These deconstructed language-based works extend from the embodied experience of her own dysfluent speech, and draw from 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 received a BFA from the University of Michigan and MFA in sculpture from RISD (Rhode Island School of Design). Her 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. Interviews and reviews have appeared 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, Dieu Donné, Complex Systems Art and Physics Residency at the University of Oregon supported by a National Science Foundation Grant, and Institute for Electronic Arts (iea) at Alfred University. Recent awards are a 2023 NYFA Fellowship Grant for Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts, a 2023 Artist Fellowship at the New York Public Library Picture Collection investigating how sound is contained in images, and a 2024 Book Artist in Residence at Center for Book Arts.
Wolowiec currently teaches at Parsons School of Design, Dia Art Foundation, and directs the publishing platform Gravel Projects
While in residence, Audra created a screenprint edition from a photograph of words cast in ice melting on the shore of the Hudson River, part of the performance “(waves)”, a laser cut book “AIR” in an edition of 30 with laser cut commas from the US Constitution as a sound score for the breath, and dye sublimation prints on fabric of the ice words in various tonal colors, and a large book printed on fabric with two-sided printed to form the structure of the recto/verso of each page.