Escape from Warsaw

Ilona Zaremba cuts through the wax to uncover the archaeology of her past.

By: Ilene Dube

"Oops There Goes Gravity: II," by Ilona Zaremba.

   As a sassy ex-convict in Bringing Down the House, Queen Latifah keeps viewers’ eyes riveted as she works her way into the life of a tax attorney played
by Steve Martin. Those who let their eyes wander from the comedy’s star might have noticed something else: the richly textured, earth-toned mixed media compositions on canvas by Toronto-based artist Ilona Zaremba.

   The camera sometimes pans across the artwork before settling on a character. "I forgot I had signed the contract for the movie," says Ms. Zaremba, in Princeton for the opening of her show, Past Made Present, at the Marsha Child Contemporary Gallery through May 26.

   "My daughter went to see the movie, and I asked her, ‘Did you see my pieces?’" But the 14-year-old’s attention had been on the story and she missed the cameo appearances of her mother’s artwork. Thankfully, life offers second chances: Ms. Zaremba took her daughter and a cadre of friends to see it again.

   The bluish/greenish-eyed artist drove the 13 hours from Toronto with her husband, Piotrek, in a jeep with the back seats removed to make room for the neatly packed canvases. They left home at 2 a.m. so that Mr. Zaremba would only lose one day of work as a computer programmer. He napped in the jeep for an hour before heading back.

   The Polish natives met in Toronto. "It was our passion for Mexico that drew us together," he says. Ms. Zaremba had been to Mexico first and left her diary there; Mr. Zaremba traced her path and retrieved the diary.

   "Did you read it?" Marsha Child wants to know.

   "No," says Mr. Zaremba. "I just picked it up and threw it in my backpack. It was so heavy."

   Surrounded by the abstract compositions of ceremonial vessels and monolithic forms in bold reds with orange, brown, gold and touches of celadon, Ms. Zaremba says the canvases are like her diaries. With long blond dreadlocks held in a tan bandana, the artist barely looks old enough to have accomplished this large body of work. It turns out she produced everything for the show in the last few months. "I’m a workaholic," she admits.

   Ms. Zaremba’s story began in Warsaw, where she grew up surrounded by magnificent buildings. The daughter of a printer and an accountant aspired to a career in architecture and went to a special high school for design, where she would be prepared for an architectural college.

"Behind the Moon," mixed media by Ilona Zaremba, on view at Marsha Child Contemporary.

   "I really wanted to study archeology but my mother wouldn’t let me," she says, speaking in carefully enunciated English.

   Then, in 1986, her parents fled to Canada to escape communism. They took the baby with them, leaving Ilona, then 17, with her 20-year-old sister. Ms. Zaremba’s parents, who were politically active, had hoped to bring the two young women shortly after, but the Polish government took their rights away after they left. Ms. Zaremba was adopted by the government and cared for by a woman who took in orphans. After two years of paperwork, she was reunited with her family in Toronto.

   "We had to grow up fast," says the artist, who completed 12th grade in Canada, then studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design after her first two children were born.

   "I was always searching for number three," says Ms. Zaremba. Three is an important element in her work. She is one of three siblings, and her mother was one of three, so she had her third child, a second boy, just as she was embarking on a successful career.

   Ms. Zaremba never studied painting in college; her early work was sculpture and installations. Some were comprised of what look to be utility poles, suspended by wire. She unearthed the utility poles from under a hill in a Toronto park. "That’s my archeology," she says. "The installation is about the process of digging them out and cleaning them."

   Ms. Zaremba participated in a show on erotica, in which the artists included a heterosexual male, a heterosexual female, a homosexual male and a homosexual female. Ms. Zaremba’s contribution was based on the book DaVinci and a Memory of His Childhood by Sigmund Freud. In the book, Freud describes how Leonardo DaVinci’s early family dynamics affected his sexuality.

   In one of the pieces for that show, three sets of lactating breasts are suspended from a steel beam. Into the beam are chiseled both the words of Freud and Ms. Zaremba. She had just finished breast-feeding her third child but was still pumping milk. Every day she brought a fresh batch of her milk into the gallery and poured it into a baby bottle hidden inside the steel beam.

   "My work is about collective memory and symbolic icons," says Ms. Zaremba. "I did a lot of nurturing and analysis through art. I felt abandoned when my parents left, but I also thought of how my mother would feel, not being able to nurture me."

   Ms. Zaremba’s work evolved into painting as another form of sculpture. "The flatness of painting doesn’t do much for me. I had to add texture."

   Ms. Zaremba adds pigment to wax and builds up layers on canvas with a brush. Then she burns it with a gas torch and uses ceramic tools to give it texture. There is more, but these are her "sacred techniques" she will not reveal.

   The canvases were on view in a gallery in Los Angeles. One day, the actor Steve Martin, known for having a large collection of art, came in and bought four of Ms. Zaremba’s canvases.

   "Just to have my work in Steve Martin’s collection, I would have given them away," she says giddily.

   Mr. Martin is so fond of his collection, according to Ms. Zaremba, he likes to show it off in the movies he is in, and that is how Ms. Zaremba’s canvases wound up in Bringing Down the House. "Mine is the biggest piece in the living room and in the hallway, there is one he always stops by," she says.

   Contrasting the days when her palette had earthier tones, Ms. Zaremba embraces the boldness of red. "I used to be scared of red and I wanted to fight it. Red is so in-your-face, you have to be careful how people are going to react."

   Although her sculptural work is often compared to that of Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz, Ms. Zaremba’s role model is French artist Louise Bourgeois. "I feel a very close connection to her," Ms. Zaremba says of the 92-year-old artist best known for her sculpture.

   "She has three kids, and subconsciously she also is dividing by three." Ms. Zaremba contacted Ms. Bourgeois’ gallery in New York and told them she wanted to meet Louise. Ms. Bourgeois responded, saying Ms. Zaremba could come any Sunday, and so Jan. 2 Ms. Zaremba went to Ms. Bourgeois’ Chelsea, N.Y., townhouse. "She’s tiny and fragile but made these humongous sculptures. No one ever told me about her in school."

   About the dreadlocks: Ms. Zaremba was traveling in Europe with her husband when the World Trade Center in New York was attacked Sept. 11. "I was shocked by not having my kids with me," says the artist, who works in the basement of her home so she can spend all the time possible with her family. "It was the worst and best trip of my life. I was crying the whole time. We tortured ourselves watching CNN. Then, a week later, back in Toronto, I found an Ethiopian salon and did this. I had always admired dreadlocks, but no one in Poland ever had them and I never had the guts."

   The émigré says she feels lost between the old Poland and the new. "My Poland is the old Poland; I’ve only been back once. I don’t want to see it now so I don’t go."



Past Made Present: The Paintings of Ilona Zaremba is on view at the Marsha Child Contemporary Gallery, 220 Alexander St., Princeton, through May 26. Gallery hours: Tues.-Sat. 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. and by appointment. For information, call (609) 497-7330. On the Web: www.mchildcontemporary.com