#104 - Winter Camp '24 - Bianca Nemelc
#104 - Winter Camp '24 - Bianca Nemelc
Destination: Shelton, Washington, USA
Date: 11 March - 15 March, 2024
About Bianca Nemelc
Drawing from her relationship to nature while growing up in the urban city landscape of New York City, Bianca Nemelc creates work that is centered around narratives that she imagines while pulling inspiration from urban ecosystems and her familial homelands. Working with acrylic paints, Bianca intertwines the floral landscapes with her exploration of the possibilities for brown bodies to coexist and find comfort in one another.
You can find more work of Bianca on her website: www.biancanemelc.com
Destination: Shelton, Washington, USA
West from the city of Seattle, you’ll find the Olympic National Park, and just below the National Park you will find the small city of Shelton. The land was previously called ‘Cota’ and was inhabited and managed by the Squaxin Island Tribe, later called Sheltonville when it was officially incorporated in 1890, and nowadays just Shleton. With a long tradition in logging and lumber milling, and the abundance of fire and pine trees growing in the area, it explains why the city is also referred to as Christmastown, USA.
This is our very first Winter Camp, and we are proud to collaborate together with Hashimoto Contemporary on this new exciting venture. Aside from the prints, each artist will create a body of original works inspired by their experiences during the Winter Camp, resulting in a group exhibition opening on the 7th of December at Hashimoto San Francisco.
Details about the print
Dimensions: ± 50 x 70 cm
Medium: silkscreen print
Edition: edition of 50, signed and numbered by the artist
A little word from Bianca…
"I went into the Winter Camp without any expectations, I really just wanted to take a break from my daily routine and get out of my comfort zone. I had spend a lot of time in the studio before taking off, so it was a welcome switch of pace. My biggest hope was to maybe leave the Winter Camp with a good story and some new friendships.
I was surprised by how well we all connected. In our time there I think we only stopped talking with each other to go to sleep and eat bites of food. The surrounding nature, and especially the lush forests were stunning! You could feel the earth breathing and the trees glowing. It looked almost surreal but it was very real. I left camp and showed numerous videos I took to my friends while saying "Looking how green it is!”. And still, as much as I was inspired by nature, the time I spent with the other inspiring women left a lasting impression!
The focal point in the work I created is two circular shapes which call back to the breasts you see in a lot of my work. I visualised the areolas, which are usually shades of brown, into five colors that stand out in my memory of Winter Camp. To me, the work is reminiscent of a topographic map or those diagrams in school of the layers under the earth's crust. The color brown is for the soil and my skin. Blue reflects the open sky, the lake and the frigid creeks in the Olympic National Park. The white represents the blankets of heavy fog and the snowy hikes we took. Green stands for the lush glowing trees and mossy rocks which we found in every direction we went. The final color is red, because I kept coming back to these little red plants that dotted the forest floor in the midst of all the green. There five small plants are symbolic of the five of us who came together for the week, coincidentally the number of traditional elements of nature is also five."
