I would like to invite everyone interested in photography to the Radom Village Museum for my exhibition ‘Dissociations or the nature of light?’. The vernissage will take place on Sunday 11 September at 4pm at the Radom Village Museum and more specifically in the Konar court hen house.
The exhibition will present 24 photographs taken on the grounds of the Museum, depicting an alternative version of the reality that surrounds us.
Light is commonly known as the visible part of electromagnetic radiation. Human eyes can perceive wavelengths of 400 -700nm, but there are also variations between 380nm and 780nm. Hence, the perception of the world may vary slightly. But is what surrounds us the only version of reality? No, so let us look at animals. Dogs cannot see the colour green. Birds see in the ultraviolet. Crustaceans can use filters to split ultraviolet light into more subtle colours. Snakes can see in two ways: some colour and some infrared. From this comes the subjectivity of perception due to our eye structure and biology in general.
Light is the most important subject in photography, which is why I have been exploring the nature of light ever since I took up photography seriously. In my work, I try not to show the world as we see it, but as I would like to see it. I use various techniques to achieve the results I want, such as black-and-white photography, which is an unreal representation of reality, and pinhole photography, which shows a different nature of light and also makes the image unreal. Hence my interest in infrared photography. I want to expand people’s perception of reality, to get closer to nature and see it a little from the position of animals. The grounds of the Radom Countryside Museum are perfect for this, as the countryside is closely linked to nature. It was in the countryside that its inhabitants whitewashed their huts because the colour blue repels insects as opposed to yellow, which attracts them. Folk wisdom stemmed primarily from observations of nature.
I became interested in infrared photography 12 years ago, but it wasn’t until the advent of what are commonly known as “mirrorless” cameras that I became fascinated with the technique. I was able to observe ‘live’, in the viewfinder, a surreal world in which colours, contrast and light change. Using different filters to cut off different ranges of electromagnetic wavelengths shows an alternative version of reality. Perhaps this is how spiders or birds see the world around us. From a human point of view, it is a kind of dissociation of perception. The question then arises, what is the difference between dissociation and the creation of reality in the creative process? The exhibition ‘Dissociation or the nature of light?’ is a step towards my rejection of realism and rationality in favour of surrealism and abstraction.
