The exhibition „Objects and Notes” by Julia Taszycka at Gallery 35A presents the artist’s work created between 2021 and 2022 in New York. The discreet nature of Taszycka’s ready mades is a direct reference to the minimalist and conceptual fascinations of the American avant-garde of the last decades of the 20th century. However, while the attention of the artists of that time focused primarily on the nature and structural properties of the materials themselves, entangled in formalistic discussions from the field of art history and theory, in Taszycka’s case the vector of reflection is radically tilted beyond the domain of aesthetic considerations.
The objects presented in this exhibition function rather as traces, formal clues (in an ontological sense) leading to the interior of a complex system of relations existing between objects, their production, and thus also provenance derived from the core of the so-called post-industrial reality. Objects of this kind acquire the status of critical pointers to the realities of the organized world of production, bureaucracy, and ubiquitous commodity fetishism, through which the „object” of production or transaction also becomes the increasingly less tangible elements of our everyday life; they are adjacent to each other by way of a materialized postscript to the realities in which we currently function: fluid, impermanent, fetishizing the superficiality of aesthetics, the flexibility and mobility of an age of temporary contracts and insufficiently clear conditions that often change from hour to hour.
All these traces of material culture—discarded as no longer functional elements, shifted into the background of a preoccupied with itself scene of social and economic exchange—generally function only as trash. The haphazard status of something discarded is given here a distinct meaning: their common denominator is the maintenance of a certain external order (connecting, structuring, giving form, enabling, if only, transportation); in the juxtaposition of these scattered traces, we recognize the current preoccupations of the era, its supersaturation, its aimless overproduction, the silent horror of a world of excess.
Marcin Czerkasow
01–02.2023 Objects and Notes, 35A Gallery, Warsaw