September 20–November 2, 2025
Magdalena Dukiewicz Solo exhibition curated by Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger
Wave Hill, Public Garden and Cultural Center
4900 Independence Avenue Bronx, NY 10471

Sunday, September 21, 2025
Opening reception

Saturday, Oct 25 at 3:00 PM–4:00 PM
Meet the Artist: Magdalena Dukiewicz artist talk and installation activation
Wave Hill, Public Garden and Cultural Center, Glyndor Gallery
4900 Independence Avenue Bronx, NY 10471

Bloom is an immersive, interactive sound installation that addresses environmental inequality in New York City and its social, economic, and health consequences for local communities. I collect data and translate it into sound, creating a dystopian, futuristic vision of the urban landscape. Through a sensory experience, the installation invites the audience to reflect on and explore this invisible yet tangibly felt layer of reality.

The installation features eleven sculptural, flower-like forms submerged in Poland Spring water jugs filled with collected rainwater—like wilted blooms in makeshift vases. Each flower is constructed from hand-stitched Woodear mushrooms, copper filaments, and anthers formed from the artist’s own felted hair, creating hybrid botanical bodies that pulse with intimacy and decay.

These forms are interactive. When approached or touched, they emit sounds generated from live environmental data pulled from air quality monitoring towers across New York City. The pitch, tempo, and rhythm shift with fluctuating levels of ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and fine particulate matter (PM2.5), making the presence of pollution both audible and embodied. The base audio—human breathing exercises—warps through sonification, transforming into abstract compositions shaped by the atmosphere itself.

Over time, the water in the jugs shifts in color as the copper corrodes, offering a slow, chemical trace of environmental impact. Transformation and entropy are integral to the piece.

The architecture of the Sunroom Porch becomes part of the installation. Its windows and skylights are sealed with translucent membranes—made from collagen, glycerin, and deep red organic dyes—that cling to the glass with only water. Exposed to persistent dry heat from overhead heaters, these skin-like surfaces contract, crack, and partially peel away, revealing glimpses of the manicured Wave Hill Garden beyond. The heat creates both visual change and physical discomfort, heightening awareness of breath, skin, and space.

Wood ear mushrooms, central to the installation, are revered in traditional Chinese medicine for their ability to nourish lungs and blood. Their form—ambiguous and ear-like—suggests memory and listening, resilience and decomposition. Their biological ability to dehydrate and revive becomes a living metaphor for cycles of collapse and regeneration.

Installed in Riverdale, a predominantly white, affluent area of the Bronx, the work draws deliberate contrast with nearby neighborhoods like Mott Haven and Hunts Point. There, long histories of environmental injustice—highways, waste stations, and truck traffic—have made the air toxic. Asthma hospitalization rates among children are up to 15 times higher than in Riverdale. By translating real-time air quality data into sensory experience, the work reveals these conditions not just as ecological, but political. It confronts environmental injustice by making invisible systems audible, visible, and bodily. Biomaterials, discomfort, and decay evoke the slow violence that certain communities endure.

About the Artist

Magdalena Dukiewicz (Warsaw, Poland) is a visual artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and the Complutense University in Madrid. Her work has been presented in solo and two-person exhibitions at GHOSTMACHINE Gallery, York, NY (2023), Ivy Brown Gallery, New York, NY, (2022), Fundación Bacalarte, Warsaw, Poland (2021), The Border Project Space, New York, NY (2020), and Stand4 Gallery, New York, NY (2020). Her work was showcased as a part of the inaugural show at Bio BAT Art Space and Sci-Art Center, New York, NY (2019), and during the Berlin Art and Science Week (2018).

Dukiewicz has been included in group exhibitions at 601 ArtSpace, NY (2025), NO Gallery, New York, NY (2023), The Immigrant Artist Biennial at NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY (2023) SVA Flatiron Gallery, New York, NY (2022), Camden Art Centre, London, UK (2019) and the Museum of Jurassic Technology, LA, CA (2016).

Dukiewicz has been awarded Pioneer Works Art Residency in Brooklyn, NY, Nessa Cohen Grant for Sculpture, Polish Ministry of Culture and Heritage Grant, Carlos Amorales Studio Residency in Mexico City, and the SVA’s Bio Art Residency in New York.

In Fall 2025, Dukiewicz will present an interactive sound installation at Wave Hill (The Bronx, NY).

About Wave Hill

Since its establishment as a public garden in 1965, Wave Hill has grown into a unique urban oasis—a world-class garden and a deeply valued space for connecting with nature. The institution’s mission is to celebrate the art of horticulture and the site’s landscape heritage, to preserve its extraordinary vistas, and to deepen the human relationship with the natural world through programs in gardening, education, and the arts.

Exhibitions at Glyndor Gallery, the historic Wave Hill House, and throughout the gardens and outdoor spaces engage with timely social and ecological themes. Wave Hill also runs dynamic artist development programs, offering creators the opportunity to produce new work in a unique environment. These initiatives not only encourage experimentation with form and materials but also support the creation of site-specific works that are deeply rooted in nature, place, and local community.

Wave Hill provides an inspiring platform for artistic projects addressing ecology, environmental justice, memory of place, and the human-nature relationship. The exhibition for which I am seeking funding aligns closely with this mission—through its use of organic materials, biomaterials, and recycled elements, as well as its exploration of the socio-political consequences of urban environmental degradation.

This exhibit is supported by Wave Hill Public Garden & Cultural Center and the Polish Cultural Institute New York

1. Lead image: Detail of the installation, 2025, Wood ear Mushrooms, artist’s hair, cooper rods, plastic containers, water, metal debris, speakers, Arduino
2. Detail of the installation, 2025, Wood ear Mushrooms, artist’s hair, cooper rods, plastic containers, water, metal debris
3. Detail of the installation, 2025, Wood ear Mushrooms, artist’s hair, cooper rods, water, debris
4. Detail of the installation, 2025, Wood ear Mushrooms, artist’s hair, cooper rods
5. Detail of the installation, 2025, Wood ear Mushrooms, artist’s hair, cooper rods, plastic containers, water, metal debris, speakers, Arduino
6. Detail of the installation, 2025, biomaterial