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.

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Ian states, “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.”

 

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.