we are not hatched from eggs

Solo Show at Post Box Gallery, 7 Howick Place, London.

Joanna Bryniarska’s practice is one which touches on many recognizable references, both art historical and literary, and yet eludes easy categorization. Just as many of her pieces hover between painting and photography, thus frequently the subject matter of her art proposes a historical vacuum. In “Grow or Die” an ornate 19th Century neoclassical table undergoes an Ovidian manipulation as it sprouts camera lenses, and “Drink Deep or Taste Not the Plasma Spring” sees an image of classical statuary sampled, reconfigured and deposited back on porcelain – a material which in itself carries a new load of cultural baggage.

Titles are important to Bryniarska’s practice. They do not readily give us access to the specific work in question – nothing could be more deliberately obfuscating than “The Confounding Mystery Of The Passage Of The Revelation Into The Mist Of Legend” – but rather they serve to flesh out the scope and ambition of Bryniarska’s enquiries. These enquiries cover the range of human experience from sex to death and, more particularly, what it is for the artist to record such experience.

The reciprocal relationship of art and life, of event and record, is fore-grounded, sometimes with knowing over-emphasis, in an attempt to focus in on the fertile areas that lie between the binary truths of history. As the artist Martin Westwood writes in the catalogue that accompanies this exhibition:

"Within Bryniarska's work we have a linking of paired terms. Progress/regress, witness/spectator, artifact/evidence, original/reproduction, history/time. The understated rhetorical mode here is parody and pastiche. Utilizing the distance of the mock-heroic Bryniarska has reproduced, mimicked and woven together complex images of technology, gender, history and death."

• Publisher