Susy Bielak

Susy Bielak is an artist and writer who draws upon encounters in daily life to speak to larger human concerns including history, migration, displacement, and the relationship between domestic life and disaster. With a practice centered in drawing and language, she works across media including installation, performance, photography, printmaking, and video. Bielak’s work has been collected and exhibited widely, including by the International Print Center, Museo Tamayo, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and Walker Art Center. Her artwork and writing have been published in Art Papers, Poetry Magazine, and New American Paintings. She was a 2020-21 BOLT artist-in-residence at Chicago Artists Coalition, and is a 2022 Spudnik Press artist-in-residence and Ragdale Fellow. Together with Fred Schmalz, Bielak is an ongoing artist-in-residence at Grand Central Art Center, with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Website:

www.susybielak.com/

Residency Period:

May 2022–Jun 2022

Project Statement:

Listening series: Susy Bielak will use a residency at Spudnik to create a suite of portraits of people in the act of listening. This is part of an ongoing series that draws relationships between people and infrastructural and natural disasters.

Inspired by Pauline Ontiveros’ expansive understanding of listening as an act of meditation, tuning, and focus, and R. Murray Schafer’s concept of hearing as “a way of touching at a distance,” Bielak will photograph choreographers, musicians, and poets as they stage acts of listening in their homes. Bielak will translate the resulting images into a series of prints, with accompanying short texts based on conversations with the artists.