untitled (self), 2021
curated by Arthur Codier (The Balcony) at Art Au Centre 6# at Liegé, Belgium
Text by Arthur Cordier, organizer of The Balcony an artist-run multi-headed creature based in The Hague (NL)
Laura Jatkowski likes to fix things, study fridges, and ride her bike.
Behind such a peculiar collection of interests lies the commitment to locate how everyday households and manufactured goods shape, craft, and convey our moods, longings, and desires into the world. The emotional knowledge that emanates from seemingly banal and gloomy items is twisted into her practice by accumulation and gestural repetition.
In the installation Untrammeled, away she goes (2017) Laura collected, trimmed and welded a dozen bikes into a crooked line, forming a forest-like series of poles. Her work Canaries (2019), was a site-specific installation within a former fortress that was both an inquiry and an exploration of the space—further drawing upon concepts of protection and vulnerability. More recently she exhibited strike (2020), the picture of a twisted nail in the form of an inner struggle, the embodiment of oneself.
There is no room for discarded objects.
For Art Au Centre#6 Laura presents Untitled (self), 2021, inspired by encounters with fridges in houses of friends and random encounters – their doors become a storage of reminders on which photographs mingle with bills to pay and tacky magnets of past holidays. Fridges preserve much more than our food. Fridges are doors to our remembrance holding pieces of our memory. Often they become domestic decorations that carry gestures, emotional values, and histories. Each of these stories carries bits and pieces of our interpersonal relationships.
Laura Jatkowski’s artistic strategy is often a combination of low-frequency humor and oblique statements, depicting the materiality of affect in everyday consumption.
The exhibition was kindly supported by Stroom Den Haag and Art Au Centre 6#