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“WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD“
Wernoika Gesicka
Apr 18 - May 19, 2019
Shimadai Gallery, KYOTOGRAPHIE 2019, Kyoto, Japan
Curator
“WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD“
Wernoika Gesicka
Nov 30, 2019 – January 12, 2020
Agnès b gallery, Shibuya, Japan
What a wonderful world… Louis Armstrong sang in1968, during one of the most turbulent and traumatic years in the history of the United States. There was deep racial segregation and civil rights struggles. The patience of the people as well as the national economy were being drained from the controversial Vietnam War which by that point had been dragging on for over a decade. Following the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the country erupted into violent riots that spread over 100 cities. People were distressed, lived in fear and uncertainty for the future. The lyrics of “What a Wonderful World” made no reference to these dark memories of the United States. Instead, it tried to propagate the delights of everyday with the voice of a 66-year-old African American jazzman.
When I saw the artwork of Weronika Gęsicka, this American classic by Louis Armstrong came to mind. At a glance, it all seems strange and even inappropriate for the context, but when you look (listen) closely and project your own personal experiences, you begin to see a new truth emerging from the contradictions.
Gęsicka selects vintage photographs of family portraits, vacation scenes, and everyday life of Americans in the 1950s-1960s. We do not know the identity of the people in the photos, their relation to each other, or the purpose of the shot. What we gather from these vintage photos is that the gestures and gazes of the characters seem fake and staged, and that the setting looks almost too perfect to be true. The paradox is that when Gęsicka applies her seamless photomontage techniques and manipulates these images from her critical point of view, there seems to be more life and reality to them than what the original images could ever reveal.
For example, in one image, a man and a woman are sitting in front of a fireplace roasting marshmallows. Gęsicka obscures the woman’s face with hair and in front of this faceless head, the man holds a mask adorning the smile of a much younger woman. This subtle replacement of images in the photographs is a little disturbing but strikingly true to life as it represents the horror of being a woman and the ignorance of men in the misogynistic culture that prevailed in the 1950’s United States and still does in many countries around the world. Of course, we do not know for sure what the truth was for the characters in the photo, but it leaves room for the viewers to project their own experiences onto Gęsicka’s photomontages.
Gęsicka incorporates technology such as computer graphics and 3D printing as part of her creative process, but the contemporality is not the only aspect of her work. Often times, the techniques of her work evoke those of Dadaism and Surrealism.
In the second part of the exhibition, she transforms everyday domestic objects into non-functional and disturbing objects with sadistic connotations, much like the way Man Ray added fourteen nails to a flat iron.
The blurred boundary between perception and memory is a key motif in her work. It is human nature to leave positive traces of our existence behind. Some of us find it hard to control ourselves with the emergence of the social media. At what point do we confound the line between the false and true memory? This seems like an appropriate question to be asking with the abundance and manipulation of images today.
Catalogue Text: Marina Amada
Press
IMA, Vol. 28 May 2019
NUMERO TOKYO Feb 28, 2019
THE GUARDIAN Apr 25, 2019
Le Figaro Apr 22, 2019
British Journal of Photography Mar 19, 2019
日経新聞 Apr 13, 2019