Dragana Crnjak

Biography

Dragana Crnjak toys with viewers perceptions in wall drawings that somehow manage to create impossible illusions even as they seem only fleetingly present. Her fragmented images, drawn with charcoal directly on the wall, insist on the almost physical presence of the artists hand. She has surely and literally left her mark. Yet her images might well be in the process of arriving or leavingby teleporter, as fragmentary and unstable as they appear.

"After recent visits to Bosnia, I have been thinking of villages as metaphors for the unstructured, impermanent, ever-changing, rhizome-like spaces in which hierarchy and dominance are questioned a space that spreads unpredictably, where no two objects exist parallel to one another. This idea of village corresponds to my thinking of drawing as an open-ended way of responding, both emotionally and intellectually, to my present environment as well as my memories. I record and diagram thoughts and observations in an attempt to understand the ubiquitous interweaving of past and present, memory and tangible reality."

Dragana Crnjak received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BFA in Painting from Myers School of Art at The University of Akron. She has shown at Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, VA; Mount Union College Art Gallery, Alliance, OH; Kent State University Trumbull Campus Gallery, Kent, OH; Gallery at Porter, Art Institute of Boston; Kathryn Markel Gallery, New York City; and more.