J Myszka Lewis received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has participated in many group exhibitions at places such as the International Print Center New York (New York, NY), Charles Allis Art Museum (Milwaukee, WI), Soap Factory (Minneapolis, MN), Museum of Wisconsin Art (West Bend, WI), Trout Museum of Art (Appleton, WI), and the Chazen Museum of Art (Madison, WI). She has participated in residencies at the Jentel Foundation in Banner, Wyoming and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska. She has been a finalist for a Luminarts Cultural Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship, the Hopper Prize, and the Forward Art Prize. In 2018, she received the Edna Wiechers Art in Wisconsin Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Division of the Arts.
About
In my current work, I combine floral elements from 17th-century Dutch still-life paintings with aesthetic and conceptual concerns of the Pattern and Decoration movement in paintings and works on paper to evoke concepts relating to ornament, time, and impermanence.
I chose flowers as my subject matter because their brief lifespans allude to our mortality. They bud, bloom, wilt, and then others sprout up in their place. Similarly, cycles appear throughout our lives as routines, behaviors, and recurring events. My work celebrates patterns’ affinity for consistency and predictability while also depicting how change emerges through repetition. As I combine and reconcile multiple patterns, tensions and harmonies form. The layered patterns prevent each other from repeating perfectly, and variations emerge throughout the composition, recognizing that repetition yields both comfort and discomfort. Through the process of layering patterns, I mask areas of the background imagery to consider how our relationship with what is absent is nearly as strong as our relationship with what is present. I use various levels of translucency to symbolize the element of time and the layered experience of life.
My work combines imagery from a time in history when flowers were symbols of a classist culture, sold at exorbitant prices, with values of the feminist Pattern and Decoration movement, which sought to disrupt hierarchies in fine art. These positions, while seemingly contradictory, come together within my work to depict contemporary culture, which is full of distractions and easily fixated on aesthetics and beauty. My work, which is often very meditative to create, offers a similarly meditative experience to viewers, giving them the opportunity to daydream, get lost in the details, and reflect on their values and expectations.