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Community Artist Spotlight Space Exhibition

STAMINA

Work by Mirela Kulovic

March 2 – March 30, 2020

Reception: Thursday, March 19, 6 – 8 pm

/ˈstamənə/

Noun, the ability to sustain prolonged physical or mental effort.

My artistic practice is process-oriented. The way I approach the material has much to do with my fascination with chance, chaos and randomness on the one hand, and repetition and patterns on the other. My drawings and paintings are the result of a constant battle between creation and demolition. My work is never completely defined, and in almost all of it, objects lose their shape. In my drawings, dark and black spots assume dominant roles, but it is not clear whether the other visible shapes and marks emerge from these or travel toward them.

In this exhibition I am presenting my latest work on paper. Here, repeated marks are grouping themselves in some kind of intelligent order, as they do in maps or graphic representations of data. These visual explorations are the result of my temporary working environment, an apartment where possibilities are limited. I can’t pour paint because there is not enough space, and I do not use oil paints because of the toxic fumes. In one small room I have just a desk, a small laptop, my books and some painting and drawing materials. So it hardly seems like an ideal studio for an artist like me, who wants to explore freedom in many different ways. But the space has large windows through which I can see tall trees, birds, and the occasional squirrel. It is right next to the kitchen, so I can easily make myself coffee or tea. As a result, despite the fact that my circumstances have restricted my workspace, they have conferred powerful new forms of freedom: working at home has allowed me to devote even more time to my art, cultivate the ritual quality of my artistic practice, and have time to go wherever I want after I finish working in the studio. In other words, by working in this environment I have become aware of the connections between space and time that I could not have otherwise perceived.

Mirela Kulović Biography:

Mirela Kulović is a Boston-based painter and cultural entrepreneur from Bosnia-Herzegovina with a master’s degree in industrial engineering and additional training in project management studies. Born just a few years before the recent conflict in the former Yugoslavia, she grew up in urban, seaside Croatia as well as rural Bosnia-Herzegovina.These different worlds played a major part in developing Mirela’s interest in the visual exploration of individual memory. She is fascinated by the role of trauma, imagination, forgetting and oral narrative in building collective memory. Her artwork — spanning paintings, drawings and text — is process-oriented and characterized by violent accidental marks, which are often accompanied by repetitive marks, symbols, numbers, letters and paint-pouring. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions in the USA and Europe, and has been published in Gračanički Glasnik: A Magazine for Cultural History, Studio Visit Magazine, and Boston Art Review. Since 2018, Mirela has engaged in cross-disciplinary activities to foster the art scenes of small towns in Bosnia-Herzegovina. These activities include her Art Centar Gračanica, the new annual BiH Art Forum, and the cultural organization Kontrast. This year she expanded her activities in the USA by joining the artistic team at Paradoxx Films, an award-winning, New York City-based indie film company.