Bianca Kolonusz-Partee makes pictures of the things we ignore using pieces of the things we discard. Cezanne painted his Mont Sainte-Victoire over 60 times, Monet recreated his water lilies dozens more. The subject of industrial shipping ports may not seem so romantic, but to Bianca they are every bit as potent. Industrial ports are universal gateways, through which we receive nearly everything we use everyday. Not that we notice them. In fact, you might say we make a point of ignoring them. This is particularly easy in a city like Los Angeles, where the unpleasantness can be easily lost in the endless sprawl of our mega-city. Even in denser cities like New York and San Francisco, where the cranes and docks are unavoidable, most of us are so inured to the sight that it becomes part of the white noise of urban life. We tend to remember the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Bianca believes this is typical: “The average person in LA, unless they live in those areas doesn’t really think about [shipping ports] or see them.” And yet, according to the Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma, the amount of air pollution blowing inland every day from the Long Beach/Los Angeles ports is equal to that generated daily by three million cars. Children in Long Beach face some of the highest levels of asthma and permanent damage to lung development in Southern California. Diesel pollution from the ports’ trains, ships, cargo conveyors and trucks poses such significant risks to local residents as cancer and premature death. “There’s all this processing going on that you can visually see and smell. It’s causing the same amount of pollution and damage as it is in New Jersey, but the San Pedro and Long Beach ports seem more remote.”

Bianca’s keen attention to the ‘forgotten’ parts of our landscape began before she moved to Los Angeles for graduate school, but it was there that her professors recommended she look at the work of photographer Allan Sekula for ideas on how to get closer to her subject. Sekula would hang out in longshoreman bars, befriending the denizens and eventually gaining unprecedented access to shipping yards, ferries, and their inner workings. Bianca knew that as a woman, building friendships with longshoremen in the comfort of their watering holes would not be right approach for her, so she tried to find her own way in. “I just had to be a total nerd about it – I studied the maps, and I spent a lot of time [at the ports].”
Yet her initial plein air sketches for the port series proved challenging, to say the least. Plein air work is a constant battle with the elements: fading light, shifting spatial relationships, lousy weather. Bianca eventually transitioned into using video to capture details of the port landscape, upon which she would base her collages. This was not a transition without some angst since Bianca is quick to lament the way technology can remove us from directly experiencing the world around us. But in this case, the video camera has set Bianca free: “I am now using technology to get closer to the landscape. With video I have more time to look at the birds flying in, I have time to look at the water, the air, the movement of things.”

Bianca sees meaning in the details of these places society ignores. “We’re disconnecting too far from the landscape, the further we get away from it the less we care about what happens to it.” The ports are our dirty secret, the cost of a consumerist lifestyle. But Bianca is not out to proselytize or point fingers. To avoid knee-jerk reactions, she even refrains from incorporating corporate logos or other such easy targets for capitalist critique. “The work for me is very political and very environmental, but I would never have it be overtly political…It is a place you can have your own thoughts.”
But Bianca’s work eschews the coolly detached intellectualism of ‘thoughtful’ or ‘political’ art. It is, unequivocally, beautiful. And while it is nothing new for an artist to bring the ‘forgotten’ or abject into the gallery – Kiki Smith and Paul McCarthy have made long careers of it – few have addressed such ugly things with such formal beauty.
The striking intricacy of Bianca’s cityscapes is revealed when your face is five inches from them, your eyes endlessly running over tiny strips of every color and pattern imaginable. As soon as you take a step back, the illusion of painted lines springs up, the meticulous strips turning into brushstrokes. Citing Cezanne as a big influence because of the way he could define a space with just a few planes, Bianca hacks away at her structures until only the most integral lines are left. The visual depth of the collages, especially the largest work Outward-Inward 2, is enhanced by the fact that some colored strips have been pasted over and over, the layers raising away from the gallery wall like mountains on relief maps. She likens the visible thickness to the erasure marks she leaves when drawing, a tangible record of her process.
The joy of discovery comes when a line of ink gives way to the hatch pattern of a security envelope or the vibrant red of what surely must have been a candy wrapper; Bianca’s medium is not limited to paint or ink: she is making art from packaging. In this case, the medium has and obvious intrinsic connection to the message. Shipping ports are the universal gateways to the cheap, prepackaged goods that fuel our lives. Goods we consume; packaging we throw away. It seems ludicrous to think of the billions spent designing the perfect wrapper or box for everything we consume, when it all winds up in the trash heap. Our trash is incredibly expensive, and also highly designed for maximum aesthetic appeal. Bianca’s shredding renders this packaging anonymous, breaking it down into its most basic components, and using those to rebuild our cities in vibrant color.
When Bianca first started to use packaging as her medium, she was really proud of herself for being so green. However, her Prius-owner-like self-satisfaction didn’t last. Bianca didn’t generate enough trash to populate her collages. Soon friends and relatives from around the country were called upon to carefully gather their most picturesque packaging, box it, and mail it in. The irony to convey the environmental impact of importing while receiving packaged trash in the mail did not escape Bianca. “It made me realize that I’m just as attached as anybody to all the packaged stuff we have.”
Despite seeing marshland destroyed before her eyes, Bianca is positive about the future of our environment, “I feel like I’m hopeful. The landscape is stronger than anything we can create.” Since the last time she painted at the Oakland port, some of the industrial property has been converted back into marshland; there is even a new park. At this rate, we may one day look back on Bianca’s urban port-scapes as relics of a faded past, nostalgic for trash in our unsullied future, wistful for our own Mont Sainte Victoire.

---

Art by Bianca Kolonusz-Partee
www.bkolonuszpartee.com

Bianca Kolonusz-Partee explores industrial landscapes that exist within the more complex natural world. Working in industrial landscapes – birds, water and land reclaim the manufactured landscape. Bianca creates monumental landscapes that the viewer moves through in hopes that this simulation will allow the viewer to have their own experience of the contemporary world.

BIO
After living in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Manhattan Bianca Kolonusz-Partee and her hubsand have recently settled in the Russian River area of Northern California, where she grew up. Bianca will continue to explore the American and eventually international shipping ports with the much more tangiabltangibleson of the natural world at her fingertips.

---

Forth Writer