degree piece
The world is dominated by images. Modern society stuffs itself with them without restraint and produces new images in countless quantities, intensely condensing the space in which it functions. The visually littered reality generates a state of permanent overstimulation and makes me fed up with looking. I ignore what is visible, because I have reached an extreme state of visual activity. Over-satiety and aversion towards vision have become a starting point for the performance of works. The expulsion of the accumulated fragments of reality from myself was to become an act that re-enables vision. The resulting works are broken fragments of reality based on mechanisms that are used by images in the visually littered space. They show their crowding, overlapping, interpenetration, the suppression of our own receptions and the insertion of our mutually own senses into what is situated nearby. An empty advertising rack is also a part of the exposition. When placed in contrast to the completed works, it refers to the potential location of the image, symbolises the constant readiness of the littered space to receive a new image, and reflects its eternal voracity for images and the desire to constantly expand its resources.
Born 1993. Studies: Faculty of Graphic Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (2012–2020). Fields of artistic activity: graphic arts, painting, installation. Solo exhibition: Power vs Force, Gallery of the Studio No. 6, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (2019).
supervisor: Prof. Andrzej Węcławski
Our environment is saturated with the intrusive presence of images. They attack us from all sides, at every possible moment. The external and internal space is appropriated by various types of images. We do not like them and we are outraged at their ugliness, but we become accustomed to their presence in the course of time. We become indifferent to them, and they are a part of our everyday life. The insatiability with images is an allegorical reference to a consumer civilisation that produces and desires increasingly more things. This is the topic of Anna Mazgaj’s work They now come from somewhere else… The title of the degree piece, taken from Jean Baudrillard’s essay For illusion isn’t the opposite of reality introduces us to the atmosphere of the creation process in the least literal manner. In contrast to pop art artists, Anna Mazgaj is not fascinated with the world of mass culture, which can be transferred to high art. In the visual dimension, she uses similar motifs, materials and quotations. However, the tone of the works is essentially different. The author creates images by means of plexiglass, paper, mirror plates and plastic film, mixing them into a visual cocktail. It is a specific apotheosis of visual trash space. This work is also a discourse with the modern aesthetics of the place, where images almost overlap, forming unexpected constellations and strings of unpredictable combinations. In the central part of the exhibition, the author placed an old empty advertising rack. It is ready to accommodate another completely needless image.