February 23 – March 15, 2008

 

A modestly bourgeoise house in New England, a white stern facade,  - temporarily abandoned, the windows covered with fabrics like domestic flags, blinding the house's 'eyes' to the outside world. The surrounding garden has some leaves on the grass, the first signs of fall. What could be quite a common scene, a fleeting observation, grows into an awkward monument of silenced social life and past joy. These (improvised) window covers invented by the residents of this house, look more than odd. They have a friendly but mildly eccentric aura, - striped patterns in convenient colors, hanging down on the outside of the windows, like an exhibition, exposed to the weather, an almost tender and absurdly fragile decor of the otherwise very regular and stainless perfect surface of the house. The interior is turned into a prop of the exterior. A cool everyday surrealism.

This signature image of WHEN WAS IT EVER LIKE IT IS NOW is an ambassador, reflecting a longtime project of Polish-born artist MARGARETE JAKSCHIK who has lived in Germany since 1980 when the artist was six years old. Living further on in Cologne JAKSCHIK studied at the Kunstakademie Duesseldorf in the class of Thomas Ruff.
But the connections to this restrained photographer school turned out to be more of an antipode. JAKSCHIK became something of a conscious drop out, following her own generational intuitions. Her photographs are almost not about photography anymore, although she exploits the very possibilities of the medium up to the points of its death, leaving its calls behind by impartibly following tracks of the personal, intimate, images of longing and desire, of subcultural traces and sounds expressed pictorially. At the same time on a conceptual level, she claims the choice of her images to be of a generational and very contemporary expression, if not an urgency.

MARGARETE JAKSCHIK has been drawn for years to the popular American iconography of urban symbols, archetypal interiors and music scenes. In her last individual exhibition at Galerie Gisela Capitain "Pardon my heart" (the title adopted from a 1975 Neil Young song) the artist lived for a while in Los Angeles with the intention to search for the remnants of the 'bohemia de luxe' of the 1970s, capturing a spirit that vanished for all times. But what happened in Jaschik’s photos really is not the representation of the glamorous city but the very declaiming of its notoriety. "The images seem to have come about by accident, and yet they tell the story of an era of dissolution – and they tell it with great precision." (Noemie Smolik, Artforum, Nov 2006).

 WHEN WAS IT EVER LIKE IT IS NOW shows a series of images which denote more than ever before layers of past time and dissonant places, they embrace a sense of exquisite mourning, and explore the edges of photography itself.

The title was inspired by casual graffiti written on a wall in the apartment of an artist friend in New York. Spinning ironically on the nostalgia of an escapist mind that „everything was so much better in the past“ the line leaves a lot to speculation. It can be stated in times of a coming dilemma or catastrophe, like the environmental one we are facing, but it can also be the agent of a new perspective. It can also be a slogan corrupted by propaganda.

The images were carefully chosen by MARGARETE JAKSCHIK in a step by step process of determination, resonating different time, geographical and cultural zones. But differences are not at the heart of this series, its more its over all sensitive tone, that makes the subtle connection for a story of the very present, told by images seemingly ephemeral and unrelated. There is an inner bond, that reflects the seducing maneuvers of mind and memory, resonating in a set of found and observed images and motifs: like a group of old medallions neatly distributed on a surface, a grainy b&w image of an elaborate iron gate at the sea side, a naïve graphic of a bird, a geometrical composition fading behind a milky surface, wooden stairs up a muddy hill in a tropical landscape, a person sitting on a desk with a lowered head writing in a book, the past and future design of the dress and objects covered enigmatically all over by a pattern of vibrating black and white stripes.

For the first time JAKSCHIK goes beyond her medium by reproducing some of the motifs as silk screens, which moves them even further away from the immediacy of photography, while the curtain of the house in New England reappears as a prop in the gallery space, blinding it, as if we are asked to go for a journey of the inner eye.

Anke Kempkes

 

MARGARETE JAKSCHIK was born 1974 in Ruda Slaska, Poland.
She lives and works in Cologne and in 2008 in Los Angeles.
Shows: "Pardon my Heart" (2006) Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, with a catalogue available at the gallery; "Splendor Geometrik" (2003) curated by Anke Kempkes at Galerie Gisela Capitain
WHEN WAS IT EVER LIKE IT IS NOW is the first solo show of MARGARETE JAKSCHIK in the US.