Installation
(Burdock burrs, chicken wire) 2014.
“Interfaced” emerges from an earlier study into anthropochory: the dispersal of seeds through human activity. The work is composed of burdock burrs, abstractly arranged and installed to create a boundary that appears simultaneously accidental and intentional. Through this material intervention, the piece simulates the unpredictability and persistence of seed dispersal and confronts the abrupt ways in which human communication often unfolds in public spaces.
By introducing an organic, slightly discomforting presence into a controlled, operative or “engineered” environment, Interfaced disrupts the familiarity of the setting. The work forces the viewer into confrontation: with nature, with the body and self, and with the subtle labor involved in navigating shared spaces.
At its core, the piece engages the public sphere as both site and subject. It resists passive viewing, instead encouraging the passerby to acknowledge the tension between presence and avoidance, assertion and withdrawal. Whether interpreted as a symbol of persistence or intrusion, the work invites reflection on how we manage ourselves within the social, environmental, and spatial systems of human interaction.
Interfaced proposes that human communication, like seed dispersal, is an ongoing negotiation; scattered, sticky, and shaped by proximity. In this process, symbiosis is not assumed, but constructed through the calculated choices we make when addressing and confronting others.
Performance
(Snow, ice) 2014.
“Stages No.1” presents Tkaczyszyn enveloped in the incongruity of summer attire, engaged in the Sisyphean task of erecting fragile barricades from collapsing walls of ice and snow. This visual tension conveys internal psychological states, foregrounding the embodied experience of mental illness as a precarious and often isolating condition.
Tkaczyszyn’s crouched, solitary figure within an unforgiving landscape evokes the loneliness and alienation that frequently accompany psychological distress. The collapsing walls symbolize the fragility of self-imposed defenses and the ongoing, unseen labor required to maintain a delicate balance between exposure and concealment, control and surrender.
The deliberate contrast between Tkaczyszyn’s light clothing and the harsh, wintry environment heightens the tension between external appearance and internal experience. The ice and snow become metaphors for emotional barriers, simultaneously protective and oppressive, that aim to contain inner turmoil, yet remain unstable and impermanent. These elements underscore the paradoxical nature of certain coping mechanisms, which function as both acts of resilience and signs of collapse.
As the inaugural piece in the series, Stages No.1 initiates an exploration of the cyclical and layered nature of mental health, emphasizing the invisible labor of endurance. The work invites critical reflection on the interplay between visibility and concealment, strength and vulnerability, within the lived experience of mental illness.
Performance
(Snow, wood box) 2014.
“Stages No. 2” is a self-reflexive meditation on emotional stasis, psychological withdrawal, and the quiet devastation of depressive numbness or dissociation. Tkaczyszyn is positioned at the center of the work, lying within a white, coffin-like box filled with snow, dressed in winter clothing. Simultaneously personal and symbolic, the performance stages an intimate confrontation with the gradual, often invisible erosion of mental health.
The sterile white box evokes both a clinical container and a funerary vessel; a liminal space between preservation and loss. The snow that surrounds the artist initially suggests stillness and isolation, but its presence is not fixed; it is melting. As it liquefies, the scene subtly transforms. What first appears as a moment of suspended calm becomes a quiet emergency. Tkaczyszyn begins to “drown”, not in chaos or violence, but in a creeping, unremarkable way. This shift echoes the lived experience of emotional collapse: not sudden, but cumulative; not loud, but terminal.
Tkaczyszyn’s passive posture and winter attire suggest an instinct toward self-protection, yet also a surrender to the encroaching cold. The ambiguity between life and death, sleep and surrender, places the viewer in a disquieting position - not merely as an observer, but as a witness. The installation is staged almost as a funeral visitation. The box becomes a viewing chamber. The figure inside is not entirely absent, but not entirely present. In this framing, the audience is drawn into a shared act of mourning - not necessarily for the artist’s physical body, but for the psychic self slowly submerged beneath the surface.
“Stages No. 2” resists conventional dramatizations of mental illness. Instead, it visualizes the insidious process of emotional disappearance and the quiet ways in which the self is dulled, submerged, and eventually lost beneath accumulated numbness. By using her own body as the subject, Tkaczyszyn implicates herself not only as the artist but also as the site of inquiry. The work invites viewers to consider how easily internal suffering becomes invisible, how it is often misread as tranquility, and how the rituals of witnessing, even in silence, carry the potential for recognition, grief, and perhaps even intervention.
Performance
(Snow, wood box) 2014.
“Stages No. 2” is a self-reflexive meditation on emotional stasis, psychological withdrawal, and the quiet devastation of depressive numbness or dissociation. Tkaczyszyn is positioned at the center of the work, lying within a white, coffin-like box filled with snow, dressed in winter clothing. Simultaneously personal and symbolic, the performance stages an intimate confrontation with the gradual, often invisible erosion of mental health.
The sterile white box evokes both a clinical container and a funerary vessel; a liminal space between preservation and loss. The snow that surrounds the artist initially suggests stillness and isolation, but its presence is not fixed; it is melting. As it liquefies, the scene subtly transforms. What first appears as a moment of suspended calm becomes a quiet emergency. Tkaczyszyn begins to “drown”, not in chaos or violence, but in a creeping, unremarkable way. This shift echoes the lived experience of emotional collapse: not sudden, but cumulative; not loud, but terminal.
Tkaczyszyn’s passive posture and winter attire suggest an instinct toward self-protection, yet also a surrender to the encroaching cold. The ambiguity between life and death, sleep and surrender, places the viewer in a disquieting position - not merely as an observer, but as a witness. The installation is staged almost as a funeral visitation. The box becomes a viewing chamber. The figure inside is not entirely absent, but not entirely present. In this framing, the audience is drawn into a shared act of mourning - not necessarily for the artist’s physical body, but for the psychic self slowly submerged beneath the surface.
“Stages No. 2” resists conventional dramatizations of mental illness. Instead, it visualizes the insidious process of emotional disappearance and the quiet ways in which the self is dulled, submerged, and eventually lost beneath accumulated numbness. By using her own body as the subject, Tkaczyszyn implicates herself not only as the artist but also as the site of inquiry. The work invites viewers to consider how easily internal suffering becomes invisible, how it is often misread as tranquility, and how the rituals of witnessing, even in silence, carry the potential for recognition, grief, and perhaps even intervention.
Performance
2015.
"Considering a proactive approach to handling mental illness, yet still recognizing that it can be inconclusive."
Performance, Installation
(95 handmade picture frames) 2015.
"I chose Dorothy... She was a woman I did not know, but I came to know of her while reading the obituary section of the Ottawa Citizen. Dorothy passed away at the age of 95, was much loved by her friends, and loved to sing in her fellow church choir. I decided to crash her wake. It was there where a friend of hers approached me and inquired as to how I had come to know her. I told him that my mother had originally sang in the same choir but was not able to attend, so I came to pay my respects. This was a lie. He proceeded to tell me all about her life. Dorothy never married. She was a devoted member of the Red Hat Society. She loved to travel, play bridge, and she was absolutely passionate about music and singing. I concluded that I wanted to give her another chance at living, to ensure that she would not be forgotten by the few people in her life. As the artwork progressed, I found myself memorializing her, mourning after her. It became strangely obsessive and almost similar to the fanaticism that exists between some fans and celebrities. It eventually became clear that I never really knew her. All I knew was my idea of her, and that thought became even more unbearable than knowing about her death."
“Dorothy” is a meditation on memory, projection, and the ethics of representation. The work centers on a woman known only through an obituary and a visitation - an individual briefly visible through a few lines of text, and later reimagined through fragments, hearsay, and invention.
Detached from biography and grounded in absence, Dorothy becomes less a portrait and more a construction of sites onto which emotion, narrative, and meaning are projected. The work reflects on the human tendency to fill in gaps, to forge or force intimacy with strangers, and to transform anonymity into significance.
Through the process of making, remembrance becomes both an act of care and a form of authorship. The subject becomes mythologized, shaped by the desires and needs of Tkaczyszyn herself rather than any claim to factual truth. What results is not a documentary, but a gesture toward resurrection, shaped by mourning, fixated longing, and the refusal to let a stranger’s life disappear unnoticed.