"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 becomes hard to disentangle. Like the diorama, these juxtapositions pose the problem of authenticity...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 artifacts 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." (extract, "Onlooker", catalogue essay by Martina Copley, 2012)
The "Museum series" is an ongoing project which thus far has been exhibited in Melbourne in 2012 and Hong Kong in March this year.
Image: © Jared Wojcik, Catherine Asquith Gallery
