Profile: MARIA FLAWIA LITWIN artist Last Update:December 23, 2015

Maria Flawia Litwin is a visual artist who grew up in both Poland and Australia, straddling the Iron Curtain. She has spent the last 18 years living and working in Toronto. Encounters with communist and consumer ideologies within social and educational structures have made Litwin sensitive to the fluid and shifting nature of belief systems. She is particularly concerned with the way changes in ideology manifest themselves in her figurative and literal environment. Marxism, feminism and humour have greatly impacted her art production. Although trained as a sculptor, Litwin’s work is not medium specific and takes the form of textiles, data collecting, performance, acting, video, photography, and fiction writing.

Litwin holds a BFA from the Ontario College of Art & Design and a Master’s degree from York University in Toronto. She has been featured in the Globe & Mail, Kapsula, and Poor but Sexy magazine, and most recently Litwin’s photography won third runner up in the Optic Nerve competition for Blackflash Magazine. She has been an artist-in-residence at The Banff Centre four times and has exhibited in group shows at York University, UQAM, Glendon College, Katherine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, Gallery 1313, Loop Gallery, Orillia Museum of Art & History, and Modern Fuel in Kingston, Ontario.

Selected Work

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Maria Flawia Litwin is interested in image-making as a surrogate for answers about the world around her. She views art making as a journey of voluntary displacement and the artist a willing foreigner. Art provides a vantage point to pose questions about the passing ideological landscape and the existential concerns brought up in the exploration. Litwin spent her formative years in Poland and Australia, and as a young adult she travelled extensively before settling in Canada. Her serial immigrant status fuels her need to analyze the shifting nature of institutional structures and their impact on the individual. Unable to trust any of her three languages as an adequate means of inquiry, Litwin turned to making art. Her practice encompasses sculpture, video, performance, installation, acting, fiction writing and data collecting. The resulting work exists at the playful intersection of inquisitiveness, humour, craft and philosophy.