subjective walks
2014
Every day I go out into the city and I give myself bear his rhythm. I savor the act of walking itself and I record the exact course of each walk. It results in a linear image, which becomes a form of an urban drawing.
The city at a specific points in the space and time spits out subtle signs and becomes a source of decisions. I appeal to the surrealistic concept of an objective coincidence. The decision on pursuing for something, even very elusive gives vent to the inner impulses that coexist with the reality. I trace magie circonstancielle – circumstantial magic and I collect objets trouvé (found objects).
Walking is natural like breathing and each elementary decision whether to go right or left, or wheather courage to follow someone or something becomes decisive for the final form of the drawing being made consistently every day. I may be inspired by a man, a piece of trash on the sidewalk, a word spoken in a foreign language. What becomes a possibility in one case and develops a network of new solutions, at the same time closes the other ones.
the work was created during an artistic residency in the Institut für Alles Mögliche in Berlin / DE
the work received City Art Gallery of Kalisz Award in International Contest for Experiment in Visual Arts „Attempt 3" for „innovative use of new technologies in order to rethink our presence in public urban space"
curator: Maria Niemyjska
photos: Krzysztof Biały
„Third, finally, I stand before a series of drawings by Izabela Łęska, entitled Subjective walks, which is an audacious attempt to „recover the city” for oneself, i.e. an attempt to find an outline of the city found in the pace of everyday walks. This is a subjective drawing, created as a type of record in the form of a linear image, transforming into a form of urban map. Here is a drawing resulting from collecting objets trouvé - items found while roaming, hiking, looting places. (…) Can these 36 black and white prints of digital drawings and descriptions of walks in A4 format constitute a portrait of a modern human walking, wandering, a modern walker, an urban poacher? The author rightly says that walking is as natural as breathing. Certainly, this cycle may well be a subjective image of a city-territory over which the body never fully reigns.”
prof. Szymon Wróbel, „Postcritical turn. Towards the art of techno-capitalism” from the catalogue of International Contest for Experiment in Visual Arts „Attempt 3
