WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS

Wessel Baarda’s work features depictions of everyday life in strange, jarring settings. A body of work where situations are portrayed from an overwhelming and personal point of view, a narrative that finds its strength on the banality of life itself. The work aims to get at the question of how we can read and interpret the act of representation and consider how it may or may not function as a form of ‘authenticity’ and ‘truth’, and how to make sense of it when all these representations exist simultaneously with little hierarchy. By creating these autonomous realities that contain a permeating sense of unease, the viewer turns into a confronted voyeur. It is a way of critically interrogating everyday life in our visual culture by drawing the line between reality and fantasy, commerce, and autonomy through depictions of (unsettling) domestic scenes.

Sourcing surrealism, comic elements, and popular culture to then illustrate mental states, unconventional ideas, and mostly, elaborated fictional worlds. The shop window is a perfect representation of such an environment that makes you question ‘authenticity’ and ‘truth’ in a hyper-connected capitalist world. What happens when you use this public space with the goal of luring people in and instead create a more private and intimate relationship with the viewer ? By transforming the space into a domestic scene, the work tries to confront the viewer to contemplate our contemporary surreality, in which the limits between real life and fiction are as close to disappearing as ever. This is enabled by using different forms of media and techniques that leave their visible marks in the final work, revealing their source as well as leaving the nature of their creation up for discussion.