Patryk Stasieczek: for that gob casts the image

Opening Reception
Thursday, April 16, 6 – 8 pm
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Patryk Stasieczek’s project configures the artist’s body as a photographic apparatus, one that renders their surroundings – professional and personal – onto hundreds of silver gelatin fibre-based paper negatives.

Utilizing their lips, tongue, airways, and fluids, Stasieczek holds the referent, that which is depicted, literally in their skull – legible, once developed, mostly as abstraction. The contents of their mouth contaminate the chemistry of the black-and-white process, pushing against the prescribed becoming of silver halides into metallic silver, rehashing analogue photography as a form of alchemy. These operations probe the aesthetic threshold between the interior and exterior of the body as a minor camera obscura that relays otherwise fleeting images that, incessantly, the mouth produces.

for that gob casts the image contrives three major photographic principles: the chamber as an indiscrete device – not one but two spaces are required in photo-mimetic techniques; the Cartesian logic of the rectangular frame – whose potency frustrates organic forms’ imaging capabilities; and colour, freehandedly airbrushed, as a non-standardized, extra-photographic process. Metaphorically, these propositions thematize an excess, a surplus of photographic methods which tune, altogether, into this site-responsive installation.

In this exhibition, Stasieczek proposes a possible solution beyond the figurative image to the unresolved ethics of queer agency in photography. They bring the queer body into question by disciplining its openings into an image-capable mechanism – not only is the queer body accounted for in front of and behind the camera, but also as the promise of an agential photographic device.

Please note that the second floor of the gallery is only accessible by stairs, but is not part of this exhibition.