Displacing the Familiar

Solo exhibition, Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne, 2010

Dorota Mytych’s solo exhibition Displacing the Familiar explored the everyday as a site of quiet transformation. Bringing together works shaped by chance, repetition, and natural forces, the exhibition proposed an approach to image-making that favoured intuition over control. Torn paper became a boat adrift at sea; morning birds outside the studio window reassembled as constellations.

Drawing and mark-making were treated as responsive gestures rather than deliberate constructions. Materials shifted and settled through gravity and vibration—images forming, dissolving, and re-forming in states of near-disappearance.

As described in The Sydney Morning Herald, the exhibition was “about relinquishing control, about heading peacefully and fearlessly into the unknown.” In this spirit, Displacing the Familiar offered not answers, but conditions for attention—where something small might suddenly become big.