"My work is deliberately mysterious, challenging the viewer to develop an individual response, to experience a new vocabulary and to set the stage for the actions of new dreams and new conversations." THE FOURTH DIMENSION : Mary Voytek came to Florida shortly after receiving her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1982.  Since her arrival, she consistently developed and exhibited her distinctive multi-media sculpture.  Her work has met with great success with both collectors and critics. The relationship between Voytek's work and the "Fourth Dimension" has been an on going process. It is easy to see how her work relates to what has been called  "the immensity of all things" and "the dimension of infinity."  To interrupt this "Fourth Dimension" the arts are once again called on to translate what the senses know but cannot say. This MaryVoytek does with clear, adept purpose. In exquisite combinations of aluminum, brass, bronze, copper,  gold leaf and brilliantly colorful neon lights, Voytek creates art which challenges the viewer and at the same time captivates the eye. Appropriating images from the prehistoric to current times, Mary Voytek asks the questions today that relate to questions people were asking at the turn of the last century. The inadequacy of language to deal with higher dimensionality or what was once called "a higher truth", or more recently referred to as "higher consciousness", calls on the arts to translate what the senses know but cannot say. The desire to investigate the concept of the "Fourth Dimension" is still with us. When one is looking at Voytek's sculptures, one is struck by the sense of premonition she conveys. She takes on the "Fourth Dimension" with an "end-of-twentieth-century" passion. Voytek has exhibited her work extensively in galleries and museums in Florida since 1983. Nationally, she has exhibited in major shows in New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Sante Fe, Atlanta and Miami. Internationally, her work was featured at the Glass Millennium Festival in Hsinchu City, Taiwan where she exhibited an eighteen foot neon and aluminum sculpture titled "Buddha". This monumental piece has since been exhibited in Los Angeles and now is on display at The Atlanta International Museum of Art and Design.  Her international reputation as an artist who works with light as a medium for her sculpture is successful and growing. Her work is included in many important collections throughout the United States. Paul Corrdry, board member of the Corcoran Museum, has just purchased a major sculpture for his personal collection. Mary was born in Tennessee and spent part of her childhood in Chicago where she took her first art classes at the Chicago Art Institute. She went on to study art at San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of Arts and Crafts. In 1982,Voytek moved to Florida shortly after receiving her Masters of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design.  Mary and her husband, Lawrence Voytek, who is also a sculptor, live in Southwest Florida with their two children. They have a home, two sculpture studios, among seven acres of jungle near the Gulf of Mexico. During her first years in Fort Myers, Mary and her husband, Lawrence, established a business called Voltwerks. It was set up as a Fine Art Fabrication service for artists. Artists could come to them to have their ideas realized. Our specialty was in metal fabrication and casting, however many other mediums were possible. Through this business they came to work on projects for some world-renown artists such as Jime Dine and Robert Rauschenberg. It was thrilling working on projects for Robert Rauschenberg, an artist Mary greatly admires. Voytek says of Rauschenberg," Bob has had a profound influence on my work, on the ways I see things.  He is such a great artist and giving person that it is impossible to spend time around him and not be transformed in your visual thinking in some way. The profound mystery and smart humor of his paintings always leave me wanting more." Voytek's "Tower" series is constructed with bright neon encased in a polished, incised surface of stainless steel or aluminum.  In this series, her use of light transforms the rigid, hard metals into a fluid, sculptural surface.  She has been developing this series over the past decade and has recently introduced stainless steel and a larger scale for exhibition outdoors.  She has these outdoor works on exhibition at Guadalupe Fine Art in Sante Fe, New Mexico. Torch Temples, Fireglyphics, Celestial Totem and Constellation Obelisk are other examples from this series. Botanical Temple, Golden Cathedral, Crystal Moon, and Golden Feuilles are from a new series using hand-forged aluminum, images on polycarbonate, and neon. These works are wall hung and are in  shapes suggesting storage houses, places of worship, shrines, or reliquaries. The surface images on this work express the wide vocabulary of Voytek's imagination. Some of her reoccurring themes are the semiotics of real and imagined languages, archetypal images, demonstrations of physical laws and botanical illustrations.