Opens Doors to Young Artists
About exhibition
We are used to perceiving photography as a system that is open to the world and life in general, and a system that builds its semantic world – usually in a documentary manner – via the capability of creating permanent images through capturing light. Hence, in its essence photography is directed outwards, to its own or our environment, which, thanks to its technology and conceptual design, it can record in a manner that our culture describes as »objective«.
Jon Derganc's exhibition Photographs, however, introduces the viewer to a completely different system. The images presented are the result of combining two technologies: an electronic shutter and pulse- density modulation. The combination of these two technologies, or the time differences between them, results in a series that changes the traditional photographic orientation, creating a closed-in, looped and autarchic poetic system. The images of colour fields rising in large dimensions monumentally on the gallery walls are more reminiscent of modernist paintings and their self-referential universes than photographs. With their spatial grandeur and brilliant colours, which create a feeling of depth and three-dimensionality, they form their own world. Derganc's images are paradoxical entities of evading identity and ontology, evoking both modernist paintings and Flavin's light installations, while themselves oscillating between an open series and closed works, continuity and integrity and, in extreme cases, one could say, two paradigms: the contemporary and modern.
Jon Derganc's Photographs is a self-sufficient system or a product of the fact that photographic technology has renounced its basic intentionality or outward orientation and thus begun talking about itself. The shift to this self-contradiction proves to be a moment of expressive productivity, one that is so specific for art: the productivity of producing ambivalence and paradoxes that force us to look beyond the existing categories of understanding the world.
MGBS curator: Vladimir Vidmar
Production: Banka Slovenije
Special thanks to: Tjaša Pogačar
About author
Jon Derganc lives and works in Ljubljana. He graduated from ALUO in Ljubljana in 2011. He completed his master’s thesis in 2014 in Kolkata, India. He works predominantly in the photographic medium; film and digital. His work explores the limits of photography's ability to represent the world objectively, while at the same time exploring its ability to transform the photographic representation into a new – photographic – reality.
