Graphic design for Dorota Masłowska’s play „We’re All Good”

Dorota Masłowska’s We’re All Good is a play about the Polish identity. The small, cramped house is filled with family monologues, black and white images of the Mopey Old Woman, the dullness of Halina’s everyday life, and the pixelated, colourful world of a small metal girl. The multi-threaded nature of the drama allows for incorporation of the spatial richness of societies shimmering with advertisements experienced by us all into the book. The entire scale of shades develops a space for spam, unwanted elements, so common that it makes them even more unnoticeable. From a kaiser roll to the pope, from smog to perfume, from kindergarten to Opole – everything here at the same time is contradictory and fitting. The aesthetics of the daily deals was the starting point bringing the text and the illustration together. Social folklore becomes a blessing and a proof of backwardness, it makes us distinctive and different from each other, a chaos that can be conjured up with the wish that we are all good.

Strongmen

Strength has a dual nature. It can change order, turn into dust or create and build. Lack of strength gives rise to weakness – we are ashamed of it, we are supplanting the weak links. We are touched by the helplessness of a child born of the strength of those who are not helpless anymore. Human weak nature needs energy. To use strength is to disagree with a certain state, and then – actually change this state. I am looking for strength in human figures, “jock” monuments. In the disturbed proportion exaggerating features. The contrast between black material and white paint clearly cuts out the silhouettes, which, recognizable in their mass, transform into a complete abstraction. The image itself appears on both sides of the fabric. Thick paint breaks through a thin material to form halftones. Drawings and cutouts were my starting point, which is why my piece, the character of which may also resemble a banner, has also retained the nature of a stencil. In order to emerge, it needs space, thanks to which the permeating fabric, and thus the forms, can pile up and overlap. Semi-visibility allows not only to see reflected elements, but also to contrast the light with the silhouettes of the viewers who join the Strongmen. The organic motif draws on my earlier projects and results from the need to define the world and man in my own way, to encapsulate specific feelings, events and stories into algorithms of human forms.

(born 1993)
Studies: Faculty of Graphic Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (2013-2018). Rector’s scholarship for the best students of the Academy (2015/16, 2016/17). Works in drawing, illustration, and printmaking. Participant of group exhibitions: Made in Japan, Centre du graphisme, Echirolles (France, 2016); Work 2030, seat of the Brandenburg branch of the German Association of Public Officials and Tariff Union, Potsdam (2018); competition entries from the 26. International Poster Biennale, Salon Akademii Gallery, Warsaw (2018).