An introductory text for 'Marked by Light' a group exhibition at Serchia Gallery with Agnieszka Sosnowska, Kiowa Casey, Giulia Vanelli, and Yana Wernicke for Bristol Photo Festival.
To read the published introduction complete with images please follow the link below to Serchia Gallery.
https://serchiagallery.square.site/marked-by-light
At its most emotive, photography can be a time machine. A device that allows us to return to a specific moment in time irrespective of life’s ongoing trajectory. Naturally, this is photography at its most potent, a tool for connection across time and space. Photography allows us to reconnect to the most delicate and intimate of moments. It can rupture our sensory grounding and take us closer to the people and places we long for. It takes us to the minutiae and the monumentality, the beauty and the coarseness, but, unjustly, always the ephemeral.
Our lives become touch stones in the fabric of space and time, light follows the path of our existence, and we are afforded, by some infinitesimally small margin, to capture this path. Just for a moment, it places everything we do at the very centre. We can carry with us this event horizon of sorts, a moment that simply is. It is unshakably so.
But how does photography achieve this? Put simply it is scarred. And so are we. To render a moment in permanence, the photographic surface is marked by light. It is carved. It is affected. For as long as we can cherish it, the photograph, by way of its very nature as a medium, bares a wound in time made upon itself. And we as viewers are not all that different. For us to be moved and to be touched by the past is to experience a longing that comes with it a unique and unmistakable ache. Photography offers us two things then: a return and a pain.
Notos (return) and Algos (pain).
Nostalgia.
As part of Bristol Photography Festival’s World a Wave, Serchia Gallery is proud to present a selection of artists that embody “what it means to both move and be moved by others; to understand movement, connection and relation as the primary conditions of being”. With works on show by Agnieszka Sosnowska, Giulia Vanelli, Kiowa Casey, and Yana Wernicke, we witness four contemporary artists that use photography to reach across the confines of time, connecting to the most central and cherished parts of their lives.
Our lives become touch stones in the fabric of space and time, light follows the path of our existence, and we are afforded, by some infinitesimally small margin, to capture this path. Just for a moment, it places everything we do at the very centre. We can carry with us this event horizon of sorts, a moment that simply is. It is unshakably so.
But how does photography achieve this? Put simply it is scarred. And so are we. To render a moment in permanence, the photographic surface is marked by light. It is carved. It is affected. For as long as we can cherish it, the photograph, by way of its very nature as a medium, bares a wound in time made upon itself. And we as viewers are not all that different. For us to be moved and to be touched by the past is to experience a longing that comes with it a unique and unmistakable ache. Photography offers us two things then: a return and a pain.
Notos (return) and Algos (pain).
Nostalgia.
As part of Bristol Photography Festival’s World a Wave, Serchia Gallery is proud to present a selection of artists that embody “what it means to both move and be moved by others; to understand movement, connection and relation as the primary conditions of being”. With works on show by Agnieszka Sosnowska, Giulia Vanelli, Kiowa Casey, and Yana Wernicke, we witness four contemporary artists that use photography to reach across the confines of time, connecting to the most central and cherished parts of their lives.
In Agnieszka Sosnowska’s work we see a 25 yearlong dedication to living amongst the natural world in her adoptive home of Iceland. Her investment and intrigue in her environment has dictated her experience of time in a journey which she states ‘feels like she is only just beginning’. After more than 20 years of working in this way, Sosnowska’s experience has been realised culminate in the publication För, published by Trespasser.
Within Yana Wernicke’s Companions we witness a profound bond cultivated over time between Rosina and Julie, and the animals whom they have rescued. Living in a small town just outside of Frankfurt, “Companions” has its origins in the translation of Weggefährten. This hybrid words literal translation means ‘those who walk the path together’. Wernicke contemplates the ancient relationship humans have with animals through a medium of modernity, analysing our current disconnect to other species during this epoch. With numerous publications, Companions was her most recent and was published by Loose Joints in 2023. She has also exhibited her work in a number of group and solo exhibitions across Europe, and is the recipient of Palm Photo Prize’s Judges panel 1st Place.
Giulia Vanelli’s The Season is a delicate rumination on the slowness of time, a meeting point between childhood memories and a still present place where the external world feels remote. Reflecting on time and memory, Vanelli encourages an immersion in the atmosphere of a place and what it means to have a lived experience embedded somewhere. Here light, time, place, and people become one. Her work has been shown in group and solo exhibition in international festivals and galleries, including Fotografia Europea, Galerie Joseph Le Palais, and 1014 Gallery. In 2024 her first book The Season has been published by Witty Books.
In homage to her mother who passed away in May 2023, Kiowa Casey’s San Amado is a navigation of distances, both conscious and unconscious, in order to maintain the relationship of mother and daughter. This project shows with sensitivity how lives ripple through time via non-spaces, calling on audiences to apply a shared empathy. Casey has consistently exhibited in group shows, most recently with Copeland Gallery, London, and has also had several features in shared publications.
In all four artist profiles we see the creative workings of those interrogating the axiom that photography is related to the past only, and that it is a medium of inertia. Through them, we are afforded a chance to experience a past and present that coexists.
Within Yana Wernicke’s Companions we witness a profound bond cultivated over time between Rosina and Julie, and the animals whom they have rescued. Living in a small town just outside of Frankfurt, “Companions” has its origins in the translation of Weggefährten. This hybrid words literal translation means ‘those who walk the path together’. Wernicke contemplates the ancient relationship humans have with animals through a medium of modernity, analysing our current disconnect to other species during this epoch. With numerous publications, Companions was her most recent and was published by Loose Joints in 2023. She has also exhibited her work in a number of group and solo exhibitions across Europe, and is the recipient of Palm Photo Prize’s Judges panel 1st Place.
Giulia Vanelli’s The Season is a delicate rumination on the slowness of time, a meeting point between childhood memories and a still present place where the external world feels remote. Reflecting on time and memory, Vanelli encourages an immersion in the atmosphere of a place and what it means to have a lived experience embedded somewhere. Here light, time, place, and people become one. Her work has been shown in group and solo exhibition in international festivals and galleries, including Fotografia Europea, Galerie Joseph Le Palais, and 1014 Gallery. In 2024 her first book The Season has been published by Witty Books.
In homage to her mother who passed away in May 2023, Kiowa Casey’s San Amado is a navigation of distances, both conscious and unconscious, in order to maintain the relationship of mother and daughter. This project shows with sensitivity how lives ripple through time via non-spaces, calling on audiences to apply a shared empathy. Casey has consistently exhibited in group shows, most recently with Copeland Gallery, London, and has also had several features in shared publications.
In all four artist profiles we see the creative workings of those interrogating the axiom that photography is related to the past only, and that it is a medium of inertia. Through them, we are afforded a chance to experience a past and present that coexists.