Natalia Stachon | The Problem of the Calm
You are cordially invited to the exhibition opening on Friday, November 1, 2013 from 6 to 9 pm.ŻAK | BRANICKA is delighted to present the first solo exhibition of the artist Natalia Stachon entitled The Problem of the Calm. The young artist investigates the relationships of space and matter, sensory impressions and experience, form and surface in her works. In the process, the site of art morphs into a stage, habitual conceptions of image are overruled or reinterpreted.
The eponymous work is an installation conceived specially for ŻAK | BRANICKA that completely takes up the space. Stainless steel cables, with different formations of glass insulators and stainless steel elements hanging from their ends, stretch from one wall to another. The materials are reminiscent of high-voltage power lines; defunctionalized as weights they generate a new sort of tension, in which the cables regroup to form a space-encompassing design.
"Places find me. And they change me. It is always a journey with an unknown outcome.”
Stachon’s work depends on these kinds of contradictions, from a critical view of inherent meanings that change with the slightest shift/displacement and can create new ones. In the process the individual works engage with one another, thereby never appearing autarchic/self-sufficient and closed, but rather becoming part of an open and alterable spatial scene.
The second part of the exhibition composes new pencil drawings from the series Untitled. These precisely executed drawings show distorted and stranded ship containers whose origin and story the artist consciously obscures by omitting logos and placing white surfaces on the paper. Stachon succeeds also here in reducing things to the essential.
"I have aversion to everything that is finished, completed, absolute and total. I don’t believe in the idea of a concluded, autarchic work of art. Because it’s just not that way in my life. For that reason I work in series and variants. Every work originates from a previous one. They refer to each other and are connected among themselves. For that reason I prefer modular systems. Conditions, actions. Everything that you can staple, bundle up, hang, and pile up. They generate first an alleged order, but in fact their differences are still contained: their deconstruction, transformation, destruction. My works reside exactly in between. In transition between becoming and vanishing. […] In the exhibitions my paper works can function like initial sparks. Out of the intimate observation the viewer rotates again in the room and proceeds on his path through the exhibition and to think about the event further. And is maybe at first disoriented? But in these moments of loss and disorientation, where the subconsciously assumed, the acquired, are interrupted without forewarning, he asks himself possible questions: How does this all go together? Where am I? When he looks for questions and finds them in the quiet, he is right in the middle of it. The space, the viewer and my art are in dialogue. In this way the space becomes a living body in the perception. An alterable splendor.” (Natalia Stachon, October, 2013)
