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Mala Gallery
8 Zamkowy Sq., Warsaw, Poland
April 2-30, 2003 

 

 

"Paralax" by Waldemar Jama

 


Waldemar Jama: Paralax
Mala Gallery, Warsaw, April 2003

 

PARALAX - the title of the recent series of photographs of Waldemar Jama is a term that generally relates directly to physical phenomena and means a difference in readings of instruments caused by inadequate position of an observer’s eye in relation to scale of the instrument. In photographic context it means a slight difference of the field of view between a taking lens and camera’s viewfinder. This inconsistency of seeing and some declinations are supposedly a profound metaphor relating to dummies and dolls appearing in photographs of Waldemar Jama.

 

Waldemar Jama: Paralax
Mala Gallery, Warsaw, April 2003

 

To Jama the dolls are a naive imitation of human beings, their hidden behaviour and of some mystery leading towards impenetrable emptiness and despair. They mask and hide something, their perception is generally connected with some „shift” Jama exaggerates this impression by changing positions of individual, fragmentary elements, by putting trunks of dummies on their hairless heads or hands of dolls on their legs, by arranging the trunks into new, geometric shapes and forms. It is an attempt to fit together these individual parts and to de-construct them at the same time. Seemingly the artist wants to convey a feeling of error, of shift, of this „paralax” not only in relation to material substance of these objects but also in relation to the state of their minds - if we assume conventionally that it is possible to speak about some state of mind in this case. It is also at the same time a search for „synthesis of certain attitudes that are determining people” as Jama wrote in one of his letters.

The dummies he photographed already in 1966, puppets and marionettes that he has photograped from few years, phanthoms that took a form of scarecrows (one of the artist’s previous exhibitions in the Mala Gallery) - all this is a world of images that constitutes „a signal to a direct confrontation with reality of the world”, as Adam Sobota wrote in one of his recent essays. In the case of works of Waldemar Jama this confrontation takes place closely to reading error. The dolls and dummies are such hard facts but they also carry with them a possibility of wider interpretation and associations. For the artist they are a kind of imitation of human life, also through this „shift - paralax” between spheres of body and spirit.

Marek Grygiel

 

Waldemar Jama: Paralax
Mala Gallery, Warsaw, April 2003

 

Waldemar Jama's previous exhibitions in Mala Gallery:

 

Waldemar Jama: Paralax
Mala Gallery, Warsaw, April 2003

 

 

 

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