Artist Statement
Unsex me here, a new body of work by Polish-American artist Ilona Szwarc, takes place in a dreamlike borderland somewhere between mid-century Palm Springs and the forests of European fairy tales. Szwarc, who was born in Warsaw and spent her adolescence in a small town in Texas, plies the ambiguity of her own memories to explore shifts in time and body. Her photographs gesture towards a repressed wildness — a flash of teeth disturbs the too-quiet powder room; a soft mass of white hair glows amidst ornamental glass. In Szwarc’s work, the changes are both real and surreal; the memories true and false; the danger at once as removed as an old wives tale and as close as a stranger in the mirror.
