ALL BENT OUT OF SHAPE
Ian Sonsyadek
Opening Reception: August 15th, 2025 6-9 PM
Var Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Ian Sonsyadek's solo exhibition All Bent Out Of Shape.
Ian, was born in Ukraine and emigrated to the States at a young age. He was raised in Chicago and had a 6 year interim in Milwaukee for undergrad and work, and back to Chicago after that. Being in quickly developing urban centers for most of his life honed his awareness of not only the constructed landscape, but of the implications that developing urban environments have on the migrations of people, culture, and the natural elements therein. The navigating, bulldozing, building, and shifting of the assembled metropolis mimics the activity of his art making, and vice versa.
Ian Sonsyadek is a 2012 graduate of MIAD. He continues to hone his craft and develop his concepts while exhibiting work, primarily in Chicago and Milwaukee.
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"When I get to making something, the drive behind the impulse is to get at and exploit the at-first seemingly mundane quality of our collective surroundings. You either get lost in or completely ignore your daily setting most of the time, but the visual background noise hums along. With time and scrutiny, our habitats can expose themselves to the bizarre mixture of influences that form them, especially in a city environment. Observational in its foundation, my work tends to shift and merge into the abstract through sampled components and hints of collage, like abstraction-lite. More recently, this process has come to include the visual slang of mediation, through filters and layers of various apps or programs, and other methods of sharing our common, seemingly simulated, experiences. Synthetic in their conception, my paintings are compressed compositions of disparate elements of the natural and the manmade, the byproducts of our constructed environments."
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"They’re nice, some monstrously present now, varied, even variegated, and the sometimes similarly inclined guests fawn over the flora when they visit, but the sixty plus house plants aren’t quite cutting it. There were several infographics dispersed online that said certain species really blast that oxygen, but the air feels the same.
There’s a block nearby where the dense canopy completely covers the crumbling street beneath. There, the cement blocks of the sidewalk jut out from level to the city-planned-and-developed-interspersed-with-light-poles-15-feet-apart-masses-of-roots of the indentured trees providing solace from the sun. Again, arguably nice, but it’s a single block, right there are the cars, bumper to bumper, synchronized swimming in the heat waves, with sirens parting the seas.
Gone are the days of going out into unbridled nature, rolling landscapes, real Oxbow type shit. Best we can do is the conservatory, about a half hour away, traffic permitting. Inside, meticulously managed corner to corner vegetation, climate controlled and simulated by region, a great escape, reprieve for city slickers and tourists alike. It’s rife with photo opps, throw on the Rio De Janeiro filter for added effect, tag the location, and add to the 45k+ digitized collective understanding of where nature fits in.
There are of course, environmental destinations not inside a building. About a 2+ hour drive out, throw on some Roman Mars for the trip, on the way to touch grass. Pass enough of the vague nothing-in-particular scenery that renders out from the city, a scrolling loading screen building out the journey and the destination. Park the Subaru Crosstrek in the designated lot and get to steppin. Clamber far enough in where the hum of the nearby highway seamlessly transitions into the rustling of leaves in the wind. It’s convincing enough in its manipulation, feel some temporary type of peace. Go home, check for ticks."