Friday 7th September 2012

Our very own Senior Artworker Joachim Sefzick has just completed his MA in Fine Art with his postgraduate showing at Camberwell.

Joachim questions the traditional photographic image taking process in which the reality depicted is always a single vantage point, split second reality. We don't perceive the world in that way, we can move around objects and we form 3 dimensional memories. Eyes don't have shutters which take a tiny fraction of time and form our memories from this but we mostly think in, and remember processes and time-lines. The edge of an image is not where vision stops - it is imposed by the physical dimensions of the image capturing device.

Most of Joachim's research is based in and around social housing estates. Though the results are often playful in their visual approach, they depict the utopian dream of what was once called 'heaven on earth' turned dystopia. Drawn to the forgotten or about to be forgotten places, homes of low income or the marginalised in society, humble dwellings reflecting a hand to mouth existence - this work always has a political undertone.

In his images he uses fragments which get re-cycled into utopian landscapes drawing their origin from reality or constructing images inspired by traditional Islamic tiling patterns. Long time exposures combined with movement extract colour information from otherwise visually overcrowded environments bringing a sense of fictional order into the work. He overlays multiple photographs of identical buildings taken from the same relative angles to reveal the 'original' structures hidden behind individual modification - a form of visual archaeology, an attempt to discover the underlying truth and value. In other work he uses multiple images of the same object taken at different times and angles to present what looks like a panorama but can never be, because the singular camera lens perspective is missing. On closer inspection the combination of movement and time reveal an uneasy dreamlike reality.