Australian mixed media sculptor, Hanna Hoyne and American painter, Antoinette Wysocki are two contemporary female artists who share an enduring interest in the universal human condition. Musings presents new works by the artists and combines the forceful aesthetic quality of each body of work.

Australian sculptor Hanna Hoyne is concerned with the embodied experience of art objects and creates off-beat mixed media sculptures and installations. At the heart of her work is an abiding interest in the human condition and our attempts at defining our conscious world. The large installation pieces in the Protectornauts series resemble astronaut-type suits and are rendered with Asian ceremonial papers. Her smaller scale pieces, Mind Organs, conceptually compliment her larger work. The works are created initially with cardboard and plastic and rendered with fibreglass, glue and plaster and finished with faux gold leaf, taken from the ritual Chinese ‘joss’ papers. The sculpture seems at once alien and familiar; monumental and delicate. Hoyne has exhibited widely in solo and group shows in Australia and is a Helen Lempriere Sculpture Award Finalist.
   
American artist Antoinette Wysocki is an expressionistic painter who employs mixed media on organic materials, rejecting the confines of stretched canvas. The goal is to balance raw, untouched paper in some areas with highly saturated color in others, sometimes consciously, others by chance.  As such the works teeter between governance and circumstance. The works are introspective and deeply expressive, close inspection reveals a diary of inscribed messages and ghost like imagery, recording the artist’s process of reconciling the imagery with her psyche. Wysocki received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and has shown widely in galleries in New York, San Francisco, Sacramento, Seatte, New Mexico and Washington D.C. In 2007 she was nominated for best emerging artist by GLAAD in NYC.