Jacquie Maria Wessels
"Garage Stills"

MIA PHOTO FAIR - The international photography and moving image art fair

March 22 – 25, 2019
Opening: March 21, 2019

Friday 12 am – 9 pm
Saturday/Monday 11 am – 8 pm

From the 22nd until the 25th of March 2019 Galerie Baudelaire [BE] presents a solo show of the photography project Garage Stills by the artist Jacquie Maria Wessels [NL] at the MIA Photo Fair in Milan, Italy. For the first time the international Garage Still project will be presented in Italy.

For her Garage Stills project, Jacquie Maria Wessels is looking for traditional car repair garages all over the world. She is fascinated and intrigued by the shapes and colours of the mysterious, to her completely unknown objects she discovers in this wonderful world. With the found attributes she creates still lifes on the spot, which she captures with an analogue camera. By extracting the objects from their everyday context and arranging them in a completely new way, Wessels gives them a totally different dimension in her surprising poetic compositions.

Wessels approaches this series with her documentary background in mind, however in this male dominated world of rough-around-the-edges garages she takes the liberty to move objects or to remove them and to highlight her staged still life. In the interiors of the old garages she stages her newly discovered materials into a collage-like image. The still lifes that arise subsequently are remarkable in terms of colour and an often playful beauty.

Because of science and technical development, cars have developed into computer-controlled machines. As a result, the former 'personal and organized chaos' in the garages is being replaced by sterile order, as a result of which contemporary garages increasingly start to resemble scientific laboratories. The traditional garages where manual labour is still central are slowly dying out. In the Garage Stills series you can feel the presence of the mechanics even though they are not in the picture, the atmosphere and the hustle and bustle of their working environment are frozen in a fixed picture. The old garages, which previously stood for progress and are now being overtaken by new technologies, have been recorded in this series before they will disappear.

Jacquie Maria Wessels lives and works in Amsterdam; she studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and Social Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit, both in Amsterdam. Wessels has developed into an autonomous/documentary photographer who likes to explore a topic for a longer period of time. Her subjects often serve as a framework for investigating the various social conditions and the environment of people.

Works of the Garage Stills series are in the collection of Huis Marseille – Museum for Photography Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Furthermore, Jacquie Maria Wessels was invited to show her work at the Museum Het Valkhof in the Netherlands and at the Photography Festival Encontros da Imagem in Braga, Portugal. Wessels’ work is exhibited worldwide in amongst others Greece, US, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal. Recently, Wessels’ series Cityscapes + Birdmen was on show in the Photo Route Bijlmer, an outdoor exhibition with 50 large format photographs in Amsterdam and in a solo show at the Surinaams Museum in Paramaribo, Suriname. A book will shortly be published on the Garage Stills series.

More information:
www.galeriebaudelaire.be
www.jacquiemariawessels.nl
www.miafair.it