The museum reveals the full story, and it is therefore good: it allows one to choose, to accept or reject. The museum is bad because it does not tell the whole story. It misleads, it dissimulates, it deludes. It is a liar. Le Corbusier 1925.
A collection of paintings seamlessly housed within faux Classical frames are made to narrate within the gallery's walls. Wojcik's works of art, subsequently preserved as "souvenirs", denote the symbiotic relationship between the museum and object.
A corner stairwell climbs into uninhabitable realm while a fleeting glimpse of shadowed red velvet floats before the illuminated exit. A plumb bob suspended with fragile white and blue string offers some kind of tenuous measure. Red and white wrapped ribbon signals "work in progress" and thwarts entry. Fake scenery offers the illusion of spatial recession. Recurrent slips of sharp blue sky promise escape. Stag head and crucifix stand sentinel as a peeping black-faced dog reveals our complicity. A broken fragment remains, standing for the whole, forever guarded by code and key.
Jarek Wojcik re-imagines the museum as both a lived reality and a fiction: the reproduction of an imaginary space. A place in which to read history in its forms, resonances and aporias. A privileged ambit, at once close to us, and different from our present existence, the museum is a focus for belonging and exclusion; a point of origin and return. It defines the limits against which it is possible to construct masks and identities.
These hermetic, carefully considered compositions, like retellings, conjure stories of science and showmanship, preservation and loss, salvage and ordinariness. Assorted assembled props, architectures and protagonists appear to be trapped in a kind of symbolic angst. Struggling with ideas that are layered and complex, these unsettled objects look back at us as if from another realm. New fictions run alongside or counter to the official stories. Personal and cultural memory become hard to disentangle. Like the diorama, these juxtapositions pose the problem of authenticity.
Arbiter and muse, refuge, blueprint, storehouse, slaughterhouse, pharmacy, repository, temple, colossal mirror and mausoleum the modern art museum is a highly self-conscious viewing space that shapes the production and experience of art as a cultural, geographic and historical phenomenon. Playing its part in a global, ultra-commodified art world in which the blockbuster show rules and merchandising is a lucrative sideline, traditional museology and the work of the museum has largely transformed into mechanisms for popularity and commerce. The 'museum experience" is now marketed as a kind of cultural pilgrimage that extends from the spectacle of its architecture to the collection of votive mementos.
A space for the collective redemption of lost time - of the times embedded in the spaces of things, the museum is a site of cultural memory - a proprietary context for argumentation and for the telling of stories. Whose meaning is it that we experience and for whom and how do we remember?
Imbued with the artist's characteristic skill and delight in visual appearance, these recreated relics and stilled artefacts point to the seamless narratives we like to construct around objects, they remind us that the museum is an active system of changing relations and meanings and that sometimes art aspires to similar things.
Martina Copley, 2012.
About the Artist:
Born in Poland, where he studied painting and art history, Jarek Wojcik proceeded to graduate from the University of Poznan, majoring in medieval mural art with a Masters degree. With his family he relocated to Melbourne in 1985. He has been exhibiting as a professional practising artist throughout Australia (Canberra, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne) since 1997. Internationally, Wojcik exhibited in Paris in 2007 and Poland in 2008. He was a finalist in the John Leslie Art Prize, in 2004, a finalist in the 5th International Biennial of Miniature Art, Czestochowa, Poland in 2008, and in 2006 Wojcik was "Highly Commended" in 4th International Biennial of Miniature Art. He is represented in the collections of National Museum in Szczecin, Poland and the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Canberra, and his works are held in numerous private collections in Australia, Poland, New Zealand, USA, England, Malaysia, France, Sweden, Austria, Germany and South Korea.
Last September Jarek was represented at the Korean International Art Fair (KIAF/11) in Seoul.
