Four works with a different content and theme are placed around a certain middle formed by their encounter, constituting a materialized deconstruction of photographic perception. All of the works accentuate a tension between the surface and the inside; a certain transience escalated into a moment of a clash, a flash, a collision.
Immense accumulated power and energy were released in a single moment of explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle on January 28, 1986 caused by the collision of an external fuel tank.
The explosion plume, captured in an analog print of a photographic sequence on the cover of Time magazine, which catapulted the seven fully conscious crew members 65 000 feet high before their cabin hit the water surface after two and a half minutes with a deceleration of 200 g, enables us to almost physically grasp the fire ball and put our finger through the circle of smoke of one of the parallel explosions due to the sharpness and saturation of its colors.
The digital image downloaded from an online photo stock and printed in ten thousand copies weighing hundreds of pounds has grown to the height from which the shuttle has fallen.
Revealed in a vivisectional way, stripped naked, the utility mains carelessly photographed by the artist are in sharp contrast with the surrounding formless mud and soil whose amorphous black matter swallows the crumbling granules of the xeroxed photography of the machine powered by the mains.
A million-year-old rock falls apart in a single moment at the plane of cleavage. The sharp edges of the stones delimit their contours and prehistoric ignorance of their surroundings in sharp contrast.
The white coated surface of the stones dematerializes the lumps, turning them into empty shells while emphasizing their stoniness.
Inaccessibly closed behind the front glass with a chrome frame gleaming in a reflection of light, a clock hand ticks on a hyperrealistic animation projected on a wall.
The two clocks are not a video in a loop, a played image of the passing of time, but a computer program showing real time as a virtual materialization of the oscillation of an electronic crystal. Its manipulation – a shift of its synchronization with the central wireless signal of world time – gives rise to a certain gap – an anti-space which is neither real nor virtual.
The deconstruction of photographic perception shows how a photograph becomes motivated.
Motivatedness means a strong motive as well as an emphasis on formal forcefulness and urgency of depiction.
Motivatedness is a doxa of digital circulation and visual oversaturation: recognizability, comprehensibility and sharpness. It is about the loss of context, caption, explanation, while requiring exact accuracy in relation to the genre, association chain, archetype.
The carefully constructed aptness of the given definition in an individual case enables a satisfying sense of interchangeability or arbitrariness of the particular.
An image clicking into mental structures, undisturbed by mistakes.
The depicted specimen is an ideal representative of a “species” which is why it seems random, arbitrary.
It shows the moment in which the particular transforms into the general; and at the same time a certain coldness, calculation and silent violence of the process of severing, extraction, capturing.
curated by Michal Novotný