March 06 - 29 , 2004

Tomasz Konart | Press Review

> opening Saturday, March 06 | 2 - 6pm

Press Review

The high school teacher handed out a press review and asked us to find any inconsistencies in it. I highlighted one sentence, but wasn't able to explain why it grabbed my attention. It was a quotation from a speech by a politician. He was referring the audience to fundamental moral rights and obligations. It was the kind of statement that would be pronounced with vehemence, close to the climax of a public appearance - a well spaced set of strong words. Nevertheless it was vague enough to disable our ability to judge its truthfulness. It turned out that the teacher played a trick on us. She combined two unrelated election speeches by candidates of contending parties into one. I don't recall anyone in the class that caught the trick.

Recently, I came across that fictitious statement while browsing my old school notebook. It seems that the same phrases could be used today as a means of escaping from reality and directing our actions with emotional arguments, under the cover of offering ultimate moral choices. I also found several negative strips between the pages of the same notebook. Those were pictures of the bastions of moral judgment built back in the Middle Ages. Although they were put together with no intention, there is an almost tangible connection between the weathered walls of old cathedrals and monumentally inflated words found quite often in daily news reports.

I have tried certain digital and photographic techniques to create a visual representation of my school notebook. It has become an ongoing job of "re-photographing" the environment that I was brought up in and the present, as single reality. The most exciting part of the process is to watch the equivocal text melting into the gelatin silver image of a cathedral.

Tomasz Konart, 2004