Art & Life with Gosia Wojas

Today we’d like to introduce you to Gosia Wojas.

Gosia, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
I emigrated from Poland to the United States a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after graduating high school. I lived briefly on the East Coast where I studied English and Singapore where I studied Mandarin Chinese, before moving and settling in Los Angeles.

In 2004, I took up a unique opportunity to work for Susanne Vielmetter where I stayed on for five years, two years as a gallery director. It was a rich and valuable experience but when I got pregnant with my first child, I decided to instead focus on being a full-time mom. Soon, I founded Projekt Papier and worked independently with a group of emerging artists and curated exhibitions, special projects and screenings in Los Angeles, Berlin and Poland.

Initially, Projekt Papier was a curatorial project but it slowly grew into a philosophical investigation and split into two separate concepts: 1. “The Absent Museum”, a forum for individuals and organizations that uplift their communities, and 2. a publication series, “Material-i-ty”, a collection of commissioned essays on the notions of materiality. In 2017, I returned to school to complete my undergraduate degree at CalArts (while raising two school-aged children). After graduating in 2019 I began my graduate studies at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts, at University of California in Irvine. At UCI, I’ve found a truly supportive community of faculty and fellow students  understand my studio practice while I also continue with critical theory courses at the Humanities department.

We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
My research, curatorial work and studio practice always begin in philosophy. Philosophy, theory, stories, experiences, and relationships between things and between people and between things and us as individuals have always been a point of departure for any inquiry I try to resolve for myself. Research has been a method and a tool to try to understand myself better in a meaningful way. As a mother, artist, feminist, activist, writer and a sexual abuse survivor, I have a lot of questions.

I read recently that when the French philosopher Michel Foucault was asked in an interview what the object of his philosophy was, he answered that the object was himself, while his own transformation provided a meaning for his philosophy. This kind of self-criticality and digging through subjective experience has been crucial in all of my work.

For example, the first work I made at CalArts was an endurance performance without an audience. For 18 minutes, I rocked my locked arms from side to side, more violently with each passing moment until I collapsed to the ground. I also worked on sculptures using dyed burlap and hay, and a series of autobiographical photographs and text pieces. A beautiful part of my experience at CalArts, and my practice in general, has been collaboration with friends, colleagues, faculty and other institutions through performance.

For my thesis show at CalArts, I showed a video work in which I make a burlap hay mattress, known as palliasse, while my mother recalls her memories of sleeping on and caring for one as a child in the post war Poland, during the very unstable migrant life she endured with her family. The video clips are cut by a written dialogue between myself and a text of an unpublished feminist poem by a well known Polish poet. Accompanying the video and the sculpture was a series of pencil drawings of images I sourced from the internet of people making hay mattresses in the US and Europe mostly during or shortly after WWII. I was interested in bringing out the many layers of systems of oppression — class, poverty, forced and unpaid labor — and issues resulting from economic inequality, such as economic migration. Palliasse, as a unique but mostly ignored object, represented to me a kind of horizontality of labor that expressed a multitude of functions, especially those that play out as acts of resistance against power, desire against domination, relationships against rule, and body against authority.

All of these issues ring especially loud today. We mustn’t ignore them.

Any advice for aspiring or new artists?
All we have is each other, let’s respect and nurture that. Form meaningful connections with people and follow your instincts.

What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
At the moment, I am very close to publishing the first volume of Material-i-ty, with writings by Cara Benedetto, Farrah Karapetian, and Anthony Leslie. The release date will be announced on my website under News and on social media accounts. It will be a limited edition of 100 copies and anyone is invited to order online.

As everyone else at the moment, I work from home, take care of my family and try to support issues many people in my community are dealing with. And I do hope the day when we can shorten the physical proximity will be here soon, but in the meantime, stay safe.

Contact Info:

• Website: gosiawojas.com
• Instagram: @studiowojas
• Facebook: gosia.wojas