Edgebrook Branch hosts a Polish American Heritage Month art exhibit from October 1 to December 31 featuring artist Sammi Skolmoski.
Artist Statement
“Absorbed by all things botanical, female and/or extraterrestrial, my work involves vigorous exploration of obsessions and fascinations. If a thought shimmers, I pounce. Then I examine it under a microscope. Then I examine it from a safe distance, as the moon. Then I nudge it, gently, to see how it will react. This way of working relies on deftness in a multitude of media—whatever the piece should require, I do. I make. I both surf and usurp form in poetry, fiction, experimental and hybrid writing, sound and visual media—including bookmaking, printmaking, drawing, stitching, dyeing, painting and many others.
"My written work is in conversation with Julie Carr, Jesse Ball, Franz Kafka, William Burroughs and others, which is to say I indulge in well-crafted absurdity wherein impulse is privileged as a form of intelligence. My visual practice is spent eliciting encounters of disparate ideas, and then baiting them to occupy a singular unit. I believe deeply in the power of subtext, subversion and refusal, especially as means of dismantling the arbitrary societal and biological hierarchies that place women at the bottom of humanity, and humans at the top and center of culture and history. I speak for the mushroom, the cactus, the slime mold, the dirt. (And believe them to be female.)”
