Disturbing Sameness

The "I Am like This" presentation put up by Magdalena Moskwa, the Open Exhibition Association and the Sixth District has been intimate, feminine, mysterious, Łódź like... five artists decided to participate in the author's original project that has been extremely personal.

The "I Am like This" presentation put up by Magdalena Moskwa, the Open Exhibition Association and the Sixth District has been intimate, feminine, mysterious, Łódź like... five artists decided to participate in the author's original project that has been extremely personal.THEY TELL ABOUT CARNALITY AND RELATED FEARS, about introversion, obsessively recurring reflections, corporeal memory imprints, wounds, sensuality. They deal with biological and dark aspects. They have symbolically opened for us to see the labyrinths of their artistic and psychic sensitivity.

It is hard to describe the whole exhibition - one can merely attempt to render the mood and climate, grasp its dream like mysterious aura, and search for links between individual pieces. One has been faced with five autonomic worlds, five living artistic tissues of the stories remaining emphatically ajar for us to comment and identify with. After all "we are like this"...

The display location - the space on the upper floor of an old Łódź mansion which windows overlook a backyard and the most important street in the city - "has accompanied" the exhibition being equally intimate and "introvert". Not every work has been "classically" mounted; some happened to be put on a wooden creaking floor, as though left there just "for a moment", others have been hidden in the nooks and corners encouraging.

The pieces by Magdalena Moskwa ever more clearly appear as "skin painting", or to quote an interesting term applied by Marta Smolińska - in relation to one-man show by the artist - "painting dermatology". The Łódź exhibition has offered three works by this artist, made in various techniques (painting, photography, object) to illustrate her artistic idea: an approach to skin as a cover, a wrap, a binding that refers to the metaphor of a suite of armor, a shell, a girdle... What is most important, they reveal a communication function of skin which is about getting in, opening, scratching away, as well as touching tenderly and registering experience.

The objects by Krystyna Daniela Jałkiewicz can be described as predatory and severe. The "Sadness" refers to an object functional in its form - that is to a table or a bench. However, this object, bristled with sharp metal spikes and weights - as though in an act of defense - against common sense, is gravitating surrealistically, "raising" above the floor. The strict and systematic form of the work has been combined here with sculpting poetry. Dagmara Horab - the author of objects-sculptures featuring androgynous characters or merely faces sunk in resin; mysterious "medallions", "aesthetic preparations" - seems to refer to water like moist essence of our carnality. The amber yellow warmth brings a certain tension in contrast with accurate and cool perfection of the facial features of the presented characters. The silhouettes "grasped" and made "inaccessible" inside the resin matter bring to one's mind night dreams climate and flowing streams of unconsciousness.

The works by Adriana Lisowska are a specific type of "corporeal jewelry", imprints of "decorated" body fragments. Watching these, one cannot help an impression that they have been saturated with suffering, pain, a kind of piercing aesthetic melancholy. The objects and photographs by Adriana Lisowska are astonishing and intriguing. Photographs and casts of body fragments, applied by the artist, bring an association with traces left by someone who has gone, thus intensifying the melancholic atmosphere.

Dominika Sadowska has focused on the problems related with the aspects of seeing and illusion. The pieces are oneiric and disturbing, nevertheless showing elements of black humor. This has been the case of photographs and objects from the "Interferences" series that covers toys that had been earlier artistically decomposed by the artist. The resulting animal shaped silhouettes with no faces, and hybrid like entangled bodies, reveal a disturbing and alien side.

I am convinced that the audience of this intimate Łódź presentation have sensed the disturbing "sameness" suggested by the artists, and related this to their own experiences.

"I Am like This", Krystyna Daniela Jałkiewicz, Dagmara Horab, Adriana Lisowska, Magdalena Moskwa, Dominika Sadowska, the Sixth District, Łódź, February - March 2013.

text: Lena Wicherkiewicz / published in EXIT new art in Poland / No 2 (94) 2013 April - June