Jasia Rabiej
Nighttime Time
September 14, 2023 – October 6, 2023
In Jasia’s pieces people and objects constantly merge into other things but also into themselves. A girl becomes a girl, a woman turns into a woman, she may change from a blonde to dark-haired, her face can shrink a little. But it’s not an ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’ type of ontology ̶ a chair can also become your leg, or someone else’s, I’m not sure.
It’s a world of eternal morphing which reminds me of what Bruno Schulz wrote of his book Cinnamon Shops: ‘The substance of that reality exists in a state of constant fermentation, germination, hidden life. It contains no dead, hard, limited objects. Everything diffuses beyond its borders, remains in its given shape only momentarily, leaving its shape behind at the first opportunity’.
Scenes in Jasia’s digital collages may appear at first as glitched Al products but the technique she uses is quite different. She gathers pictures from photoblog.pl (a social media website popular among Polish teens in the 00s) and other mostly abandoned blogging platforms, then blends them with her own, using free iPhone photo editing apps. If we were to ask Al to mimic Jasia’s visual style, describing faces would be crucial. The faces of the actresses in Jasia’s works do not seem to belong to them – they don’t look like masks either, they appear like botched face transplants. This uncanny feeling is vital here.
Situations occurring in her pieces did not occur. Not memories nor dreams, they are a secret third thing (called art; maybe a made up dream or memory could work as one of the definitions of an art piece).
The feeling that Jasia’s works give me is also contrary to uncanniness, they fill me with some kind of assurance. This oneiric life is not mine, not theirs also. And even if some of the actresses seem to suffer, I imagine them humming little lullabies to themselves. A blissful and nostalgic feeling of unattachment everyone needs during a nighttime time.
Zuzanna Bartoszek
