June - July 2010
Kill your darling, in the textual this means a recommendation not to hold onto a favourite detail disregarding the whole, or in other words: Get rid of those parts of the text which are great on its own but do not help the text as a whole. It could well be that by saving your “darlings”, you might be killing your story. I.e. by saving your darling at any cost you are burying your narrative.
As a rule, Kill your darlings can be transposed from the literary into the visual environment, concretely into the installation of Bára Mrázková: into a set of photographic images and into a compositon which the author with the help of the viewer creates in the video, which is a kind of instruction for understanding the whole exhibition. The model for putting the series of images together was taken from the issues of constructing a text: certain mechanisms of creating compositions, or rows of pictures, which are close to the way in which structure of the text is created. By ordering the positions of words in the sentences, or in bigger units, such as paragraphs or chapters, we get a certain meaning. In the same way through the composition of individual images in the frame of a series, we can obtain the final interpretation.
The theme of the exhibition is the looking for certain rules in the selection, ordering and composition of images. The initial motive was the above phrase Kill your darling: author’s “darlings”, favourite photographs which have dropped out of the older sets, images which could not be worked on further, or were created as solitaires, photographs without content relations between them, all these were used and thus “resuscitated” as a photographic material. The visual set, made up from this archive, was created directly in the space of the gallery, directly for its measurments. Bára Mrázková set the individual photographs into a series, in the new context: then fixed them by transposing them into a new picture - a wallpaper in 1:1 ratio. The set, logically without any original relations, unconsciously and intuitively created, asks the viewer to reexamine and find the relationships which are hidden behind the decision to connect the old darlings into a whole.
Markéta Vinglerová
© 2007, etc. galerie
Kateřinská 20, Praha 2, Czech Republic / info@etcgalerie.cz
