While history painting is constructed around narrative, still life is the world minus its narratives or, better, the world minus its capacity for generating narrative interest. To narrate is to name what is unique: the singular actions of individual persons. And narrative works hard to explain why any particular story is worth narrating – because the actions in the story are heroic or wonderful, or frightening or ignoble, or cautionary or instructive.
The whole principle of story-telling is jeopardized or paralyzed by the hearer’s objection: ‘so what?’ But still life loves the ‘so what?’ It exactly breaks with the narrative’s scale of human importance.
Bryson, Norman. Looking At The Overlooked
SO WHAT is concept conceived by the cutting edge London based contemporary photography Doomed Gallery, in collaboration with Fresh From Poland showing at i! Gallery in Krakow. SO WHAT premiered in London November 2015 at Doomed Gallery, where it was a raging success.
SO WHAT celebrates emerging and established international still life photographers, presenting a range from traditional approaches to otherworldly surrealist structures.
Ken Flaherty and Matt Martin, the creators of the SO WHAT concept note that the exhibition “focuses on the depiction of wittingly constructed inanimate that seem to offer more questions that answers”. These works allow us to view familiar and mundane items to form new perspectives through different creative mediums such as painting, sculpture and photography.
Unframed images have been arranged in the grid-like composition creating visual association with the aesthetics of the post-internet era. Curators’ intention is to shift the focus from the particular, single creation to the abstract conception of the contemporary still life and its surroundings. The notion relates closely to the Magda Buczek’s performance Random selection, “a loose story about a travel with its visual itinerary collected on Tumblr”, presented at the gallery in parallel over the duration of the exhibition.
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| photograph Etienne Courtois / press release mat. |
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| photograph by Roxana Azar / press release mat. |
This show includes the work of both established and aspiring artists: Roxana Azar, Katarzyna Balicka, Filip Berendt, Magda Buczek, Justyna Chrobot, Jack Carvosso, Etienne Courtois, Dorotka Kaczmarek, KangHee Kim, Kasia Klimpel, Abel Minnee, Natalia Podgórska , Georg Parthen, Ben Swanson
Curators: Anna Sophia John, Gosia Fricze, Grazyna Siedlecka
14 -27 May 2016
i! Gallery, Jozefinska 21, 33 -332 Krakow, Poland
Private view: 13 May 2016, 7pm
A selection of artist form the exhibition will also be presented in the upcoming issue of prism.