Patryk Stasieczek’s project configures the artist’s body as a physical photographic apparatus, one that renders their surroundings—professional and personal—onto hundreds of silver gelatin fibre-based paper negatives.
Utilizing their lips, tongue, airways and fluids, Stasieczek holds the referent, that which is depicted, literally in their skull—legible, once developed, mostly as abstraction. The contents of their mouth contaminate the chemistry of the black & white process, pushing against the prescribed becoming of silver halides into metallic silver, rehashing analog photography as a form of alchemy. These operations probe the aesthetic threshold between the interior and exterior of the body as a minor camera obscura which relays otherwise fleeting images that, incessantly, the mouth produces.
In this exhibition, Stasieczek proposes a solution beyond the figurative image to the unresolved ethics of queer agency in photography. The queer body is here brought into question as its openings are disciplined into an image- capable mechanism—not only is the queer body accounted for in front and behind the camera, but also as the promise of an agential photographic device.
Patryk Stasieczek is a Polish-Canadian 2SLGBTQIA+ visual artist whose practice explores photography as an embodied, interdisciplinary queering of image histories, actions, and materials. Their research is informed by an investment in pedagogy and curation that delves into the emergent conditions of photography and the physical relationships images create as forms of experiential knowledge. Patryk’s work as an artist has been featured in collaboration with the Pensacola Museum of Art (USA), Peripheral Review (CA), Anna Leonowens Gallery (CA), Centre Clark (CA), Libby Leshgold Gallery (CA), and the Magenta Foundation (CA). Stasieczek is Assistant Professor of Photography at NSCAD University.
Alejandro A. Barbosa is a 2SLGBTQIA+ latinx visual artist born in Argentina who lives and works on the unceded, traditional and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples—the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Alejandro’s work includes curatorial projects revolving around the status of the photographic image, biographically informed exhibitions, and the implications of photography in present-day culture. Barbosa is Non-Regular Faculty at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. They have curated projects in Argentina and Canada.
