UNTITLED (SELF)

Laura Jatkowski likes to fix things, study fridges and carve stones.

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. The distortion of our habit-uses is enhanced by evocative titles.

In the installation Untrammeled, away she goes (2017) she 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 carry bits and pieces of our interpersonal relationships.

Laura Jatkowski’s artistic strategy is often a combination of low-frequency humour and oblique statements, depicting the materiality of affect in everyday consumption.

Supported by Stroom Den Haag