Still lifes inside garages: the Garage Stills of Jacquie Maria Wessels

Garage Stills, on display (curated by Marina Guida) through Jan. 13, 2022 at PAN Naples, is a photographic operation sprung from the hands of Jacquie Maria Wessels (Vlaardingen, 1959). The artist, Dutch by birth, has uncovered details, memories, dusty corners, restoring space and presence to garages around the world through hundreds of inspections, travels, displacements.

It is at least a twofold operation because he has also restored to his life a wandering dimension, deliberately “wandering” like the places he visits, and continually advancing. His search, in fact, did not start from a precise idea: instead, it gradually became clearer as he went along. By chance visiting a garage to repair his car, he began to glean its history, its changes. A mélange of stories, objects ended up in there, memories and fragments of a life that is no longer there, which she put together into thirty “still lifes” and suspended.

A visual, subtly critical lunge into a dying reality, a photographic series bordering on reportage, Garage Stills contracts into a few shots the places of human labor that the new globalization is sweeping away forever. Marc Augé tells us, paraphrasing the domestic condition with that of labor: “Hermes has replaced Estia.” For just as the center of the home was once the hearth, today it is the TV or the computer, so too the workplaces that used to place the man or woman in a crucial place are now displaced, decentralized. And bewildered, because of this irreversible changement de pas, are also those who inhabit these places, in the private or professional dimension. That is why the field invasion realized by Jacquie is crucial to artistically understanding the direction that human life is taking, outside or inside the walls of the home and work environments. A proxemics of the space of living irreparably compromised.

What new balances will be found? It is the unspoken question of her work in images, and it is also the challenge ahead, to overcome the sense of bewilderment, loneliness that rages. Jacquie Maria Wessels’ proposal thus has the scent of a caress and, yet, also the warmth of a slap. The photos, yes, restore depth to the things of yesteryear, but in parallel they seem to point a different way from complacently reviving the past in a nostalgic sentimental apathy. Garage Stills, rather, opens a rift that delicately destabilizes, even enacting, shot after shot, a shift in the gaze.

Jacquie Maria Wessels was born in the Netherlands and lives and works there. But it was in Belgium, in Brussels, that in 1981, she began her photographic career. When she moved to Amsterdam to study at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in the photography and drawing department, she undertook an exchange program crucial to the developments of her work at the Quicksilver Place Academy of Arts in London, focusing on painting/drawing, because, in the end, it was photography that would prove to be the most significant medium for her artistic expression.

Hundreds of solo and group exhibitions, from The Hague (Galerie Baudelaire) in 2019, to the city of Braga in Portugal, in 2017, from Suriname to New York (New York Photo Festival, 2011) and before that, among others, in Greece and at Officine Fotografiche in Rome. Among the most notable honors and awards is that in 2011, two photographs were finalists in theInternational Book Awards. One in the Photography: People category, the other in the Photography: General category.

In 2019 he participated in the MIA photo Fair in Milan, but Garage Stills, the current exhibition at the Palazzo delle Arti in Naples, is his first solo show in Italy. Naples does not come by chance, it does not come only from an exhibition opportunity, but it is a choice to investigate a city that represents all of Europe and holds the memories of a past as well as the more futuristic dimension of the contemporary metropolis.

Her operating procedure preferences go to analog photography, because it has an exceptional print yield, and also because it delays the result, which allows her to stay focused on the image she had fixed in her mind without distraction or haste. Meticulous investigation and slow investigation are the hallmarks of her study and style; in fact, her subjects are a pretext for investigating social conditions and the environment around them. A passion this, for the social sphere that also led her to devote herself to studies in Social Psychology (2004-2007), earning a degree from the Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam.

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.