May 26–September 5, 2015
Reception: Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Andrzej Maciejewski Artist Statement:
This series is a study of form, a collection of diverse shapes and textures. I have created many such collections and I often choose mundane objects, like in this case potatoes. This gives me the freedom to look at them in an abstract way or to interpret them on my own, without being limited by the overwhelming context, which often happens when you choose objects that are too obviously important or unusual. What drew me to potatoes in particular, was their commonly unappreciated diversity created by nature, not by human artfulness. For my potatoes, I chose to make portraits rather than simply still-lifes and I gave them names—not in order to suggest that they look like people, but simply to emphasize their individual uniqueness (names individualize, like numbers standardize). I used the large format camera and I printed them much larger than the life-size to show them like they were looked at through the magnifying glass—with attention to all the tiny, but meaningful details. Excluding the color factor by shooting them in black & white let me focus on shape, texture and light. The VIP in the title may be translated as Very Interesting Potatoes, or in many other ways.
part of the Oxford Arts Crawl
