Exhibition Narrative
After a stern but startled oncologist told me I had breast cancer, I fainted, then texted my dad while still lying on a waiting room floor. Two weeks later (and now living at my parent’s house in Houston), I hung up the phone and peeled back my middle school bedspread. I walked down the stairs and stood blankly under the doorframe of my dad’s room. The cancer was also in my bones. I held his hand as I sobbed.
Over the next 12 months, we moved slowly through a shrunken world together. We would paint in the same garage when I was well. After chemotherapy, he would hold my arm and help me walk a tiny lap around the cul-de-sac by his house.
Sometimes he would sit next to me and weep.
Low Energy at Low Tide - Chantal Wynuk
How can we rethink relationships to aging and sickness – making someone a cup of juice and cleaning up their vomit and driving to the beach and falling asleep on the couch and losing our hearing and having the same energy level at 30 as 80 and being so scared – through paint?
While we view this ongoing experience from very different perspectives, our work in this exhibition aims to push against the overly simplistic stereotypes primarily attached to cancer patients and caregiving more generally. The paintings utilize gesture, distortion, and the quality of oil paint itself to translate our often-conflicting sensations of grief, hope, pain, love, fatigue, bodily absurdity, and more.
Sometimes My Dad Weeps is the first exhibition of our work side by side.
About the Artists
Chantal Wnuk is a painter currently living and working in Columbus, OH. She was born in Houston, TX, has her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and received her MFA from The Ohio State University. Wnuk attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2023. She uses her work to better understand and translate the experiences of pressure, weakness, and power resulting from diagnosis and lifelong treatment of metastatic breast cancer.
Recent solo-exhibitions include Walking and Falling at the Same Time at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, NY; Ahead and Above Water at Stop-Gap Projects in Columbia, MO; A Beach for Me (and maybe you) at Ignition Project Space in Chicago; and I Dreamt of a Perfect Ocean, I Dreamt of Stepping in a Hole at Best Practice in San Diego. Recent group-exhibitions include Big Cloud at Urban Arts Space in Columbus, OH and Being Here with You/ Estando aquí contigo at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Chantal has been awarded residencies at ACRE, Bread & Salt, 1805 Gallery, and The San Diego Art Institute. Wnuk is a recent recipient of an Alumni Grant for Graduate Research and Scholarship and the Coca-Cola Critical Difference Grant for Research on Women at The Ohio State University.
Instagram: @chantalmika
Martin Wnuk was born in Pennsylvania and currently lives in Houston. He received his BFA in painting from Syracuse University in New York and taught art for three years in the Syracuse City School system before receiving his MFA in painting at Arizona State University. He has since taught painting, drawing, and graphic design as faculty at Arizona State, University of Nebraska, University of Houston, and San Jacinto College.
Wnuk has presented papers at multiple national and international conferences including The Fourth International Conference on the Image, The Hawaii International Conference on Education, The FATE Conference in Kansas City, among others. He has shown widely, including at the Everson Museum in Syracuse and the Munson in Utica as well as in California, Nebraska and elsewhere. He has been included in several Big Show’s at Lawndale Art Center, the UT Tyler International, and recently in the 2023 Texas National Exhibition in Nacogdoches.
Instagram: @martinwnuk
Opening Reception: February 12 from 5:00 - 7:00 PM at Beeler Gallery