Blue Ocean Theory

Blue Ocean Theory
Stroboskop, Warsaw
25.03 – 01.05.23
Curated by Kathryn Zazenski

“Blue Ocean Theory” was an inside joke between the artist and her late partner. Abstracted from its original meaning, the marketing term became a part of their playful, shared language and was used to evaluate nearly everything from food to human behaviour. In 2021, Maryna’s partner died suddenly, and in the months and now years that have passed since his death, the artist has been on a path of re-negotiating her own life, and what it means to live through such a profound loss.

There is an immense physicality to grief. It hurts. It’s heavy. It occupies your body in unexpected and inescapable ways. This exhibition, which is divided into two parts, represents the most personal, site-specific works that Tomaszewska has created to date, as well as the most physically grueling to produce. What you experience in the space of Stroboskop is a material manifestation of the year-long process of formally reconciling this wound. Outside of the space, in a nearby courtyard, hang cloths marred by crude drawings, pathetic gestures touching on the aspects of loss that we don’t always navigate publically: the denial, pain, isolation, fear, loneliness, and anger. These works are a marker; symbolic stand-in’s for the rawness, vulnerability, emptiness, and weight of living through death.