PATRYK STASIECZEK: Benign Stupor
Sept 12 – Oct 17
OPENING
Please join us
PATRYK STASIECZEK
Benign Stupor
Open house-style first day launch: SAT, SEPT 12, 12-5 PM
We will be scheduling 15-minute appointments for bubbles of up to 4 people.
Please contact:
+17782293458
Wil Aballe Art Projects | WAAP
1129 East Hastings St.
Vancouver, BC V6A 1S3
Hours: Tu – Sat, 12-5
WAAP is pleased to present an exhibition of new photographic works by Patryk Stasieczek. This is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery, following his 2016 exhibition, Burn Out. In his previous exhibition, Stasieczek explored lensless photographic techniques through lush, variegated photograms that considered the painterly resonance with the medium. While these new photographs are not lensless images, the parallels to painting are immediate.
Stasieczek’s new photographic works are a continued investment into the material techniques of image making through colour. Polypropylene plays center stage in this series of studio photographic works, a material used by the artist to control and amplify light in his past photographic installations and work spaces, and broadly used in construction as an impermanent material. In this work, polypropylene becomes malleable in a visceral manner: heated, stretched, and stressed to the point of breaking, its surface results in a mix of geometric forms and swathes of colour – punctuated by intrusions of solid chromatic fields. The surface captured is frenetic and maximalist in its photographic experimentation.
From my position looking at his new series of images, what comes to mind is rupture both in the figurative and representational sense of the word. Stasieczek’s photographs encapsulate upheaval, disruption and allude to methods of assessing, feeling, relating, adapting, and healing. The geometric punctures bring to mind Lucio Fontana’s desire to free his canvases of its trappings. Here though, the desire is transgressive and elsewhere. These photographs allude to actions as images, and speak to a broader emotional landscape tied to praxis. The works are a release that lean into another space, of play, of the invisibility of emotional labour and freedom. These images are deeply personal abstractions, physical meditations that stem from internal conflicts that mingle with glimpses of hope, redemption, endurance, resilience and persistence. These works are a mechanism for understanding. Benign Stupor is an acknowledgement of the inadequacy of representation, presenting truth as a fallible and fugitive construct.
– Wil Aballe
Patryk Stasieczek is an LGBTQ+ Polish-Canadian artist from Treaty 6 territory living and working on the shared, unceded territories of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, Stó:lō, W̱SÁNEĆ, Kwantlen and Coast Salish first nations. He was the former director and curator of Gallery 295 and holds part-time and non-regular faculty positions at Concordia University (Tiohtià:ke) and Emily Carr University of Art + Design. His practice frames the photographic as an iterative and transdisciplinary subject. His research orients the materiality of photographic images through curatorial practice, site-responsive installation, studio practice, writing, mentorship and education. He has exhibited nationally and abroad, showcasing work at Pensacola Museum of Art (USA), Centre Clark (CA), at Soil Gallery (USA), Access Gallery (CA), Galerie Les Territoires (CA), Charles H. Scott Gallery (CA), Eastern Bloc (CA), FIELD Contemporary (CA), and the FOFA Gallery (CA).
