Benton Jones, Director of Art for the Cape Cod Museum of Art, feels that the digital world is here to stay as a way that we will receive arts; that it can cut across boundaries to be a social, economic and cultural equalizer by providing access to a wide community. To that end the museum digitized its col- lection of over 2000 pieces in 2022 and is upgrading its brick- and-mortar performance space to allow for more digital art.
That space is now exhibiting “Mariniana, The Interrupted Wave: Techspressionists moving image works,” created by Karen LaFleur and Renata Janiszewska. This cutting-edge digital exhibition rides its own exciting wave of the avant- garde, using “Myth” and “Science” to explore the world of “Ocean.” The two year-long collaboration is an outgrowth of an exhibition in 2020 called “Pixels,” when Jones began to talk to Karen, who he said is one of digital art’s pioneers, about a larger project.
LaFleur said the theme of the ocean fit the museum’s mission, “and it seemed right because the ocean is so global and we are global artists, and the ocean touches people’s lives in so many different ways… how do people actually experience the ocean to understand the world? And that’s how we came up with science and myth.” Too, humanity impacts the oceans that LaFleur said is a major reason for the show: getting people to fall in love with the ocean through the artists’ imagery.
Janiszewska grew up in Toronto, LaFleur is a “Boston kid.” But ocean is in both creators’ blood. Janiszewska and her husband live in Lion’s Head, Canada on Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. “I can’t see the other side; it is like an ocean.” And Karen summered as a kid in Dennis, Mass., “before peo- ple came.” Given a tiny boat of her own she adored exploring the marshes, navigating the nearshore currents. “I’d look at the ocean and wonder what’s out there.” She and her late husband ran Pieper Gallery in Dennis for 30 years, near Cape Cod Bay and after a 16-year stint in the New York art scene, LaFleur returned to Yarmouth Port, where she’s been for six years. Both artists credit their rural/urban perspec- tives and their world travels for influencing their eclectic and global artistic gestalt.
Both are born artists. LaFleur said, at six or eight years old, “I’d build little villages of stone and straw and hide them in the dunes and behind rocks so people could find these ancient, abandoned villages.” Janiszewska’s father was a graphic designer in a family of architects and engineers: “He’d put a paint brush in my hand and say ‘Draw what you saw at the Santa Claus parade.’” Both trained formally as artists — Janiszewska with multiple disciplines, and experimental art, especially installations — and LaFleur focusing on drawing, in love with pencil on vellum.