Joanna Szproch – [↖] Title unknown from Sulejow series (201X); [+] Untitled from Personal I series (2013); [↗] Patricia with mosquito, Warsaw, Poland from Sulejow series (2011); [↓] Untitled for Tissue Magazine (2012)
This is the second time Szproch has been featured here.
I’m still head over heels for that photograph. And it’s exciting to see the plethora of new work she’s posted to her portfolio.
Not all of it is too my taste. In fact I’m honestly a bit underwhelmed by the extent to which her commercial work seems to uniformly adapt a Lukasz Wierzbowski affect.
I mean there’s no disputing the quality she delivers–it’s just according to Szproch, her approach is motivated by:
a mixture of vulgarity and innocence, saturated color and dowdiness, high technology and analogue, [the photos &] images are a celebration of contrasts.
That’s an actually an astute observation. However, it raises the issue of whether or not she is perhaps losing some of the force of the work by incorporating such shouted visual trends.
I’ve culled the above images from her more personal projects. And I want to point out how when she cultivates a quieter tone, how it sharpens the ambiguity and constrasts within the work.
Let’s start with top-right image. The light is most likely from some sort of canned lighting to the right of the camera–some of the color is getting bleached out in order to provide a nice right-to-left light-to-dark grade is preserved. It doesn’t pop like the still life to the left or the luminous and surreal image on the top left.
Now consider the dates the pictures were made: Patricia with mosquito dates from 2011, Untitled from the Personal I series is more recent by 2 years and I’d wager that Title unknown from the Sulejow series is likely the most recently created of the work posted here.
It’s too easy to overlook the way that form and content interpenetrate in the quieter work. Patricia with mosquito is painterly and connected to the tradition of oil painting until you realized that all the elements are rigorously ordered around the mosquito’s presence–and the implications of that a suggestion of fecundity as an invitation to parasitism.
With the still life the compression of both highlight and shadows both makes the color seem aqueous, as if it is both radiating off the fruits and vegetables–the lushness against the blacks and greys possesses an extravagant superfluity that I can only think to describe as erotic.
In the top-rightmost picture the shape of the woman’s body, her pre-orgasmic expression and the way her dress spreads out behind her but her head hangs, while the strain of her posture–there’s no way that position doesn’t hurt to hold; all point to a dichotomy between the beauty of nature and the way that such beauty is never that far removed from something that will soil the skin if it’s touched.
But I really love the sensitivity of the B&W image the most. The way she’s choosing to ignore how she sees herself and focus her attention on the camera and the way the downy hair on her arm is all standing on end along the left edge of her arm and the way you can see the reflection of her clothes which she holds balled up protectively against her stomach–it’s a devastating indictment of the art historical male gaze that instead of supposing an equal and alternative female gaze, demonstrates how given any degree of agency the subject can by merely reacting instinctively to a scenario can upend that entire paradigm.
Acetylene Eyes 