Galerie Fontana is pleased to present Jacquie Maria Wessels’ first solo exhibition at the gallery, titled Exploring the Fields. The premiere of Dubious Appeal will be shown alongside previous work of the artist from her series, Garage Stills, Fringe Nature, and Memory Master. Diverse in their thematic underpinnings, Jacquie Maria Wessels’ analogue photography is as poetic as it is sinister.

Garage Stills is striking in its surprising use of colour. During the artist’s visit to various garages, from Amsterdam to Sri Lanka, she explores these wondrous spaces by creating still lifes on the spot with the intriguing and personal objects she finds there. This series can be seen as the precursor to Fringe Nature, in which Jacquie Maria Wessels goes beyond the auto repair garages and turns her lens to the traces of nature in the immediate vicinity. The meagre presence of foliage is reminiscent of the Modernist battle between nature and urban spaces. The metanarrative of these works references the current changes in the automotive industry as the relationship between environmentalism and technology comes into view.

In Dubious Appeal, Wessels further examines the tension between nature and industry. The flowers, colours, and shapes of these compositions seduce the viewer – but simultaneously have something threatening about them. They play with the (unconscious) appeal of enticingly designed packaging articles that have patterns and shades inspired by nature. Not everything is what it seems in these sometimes-sinister analogue photographs, what appear to be flowers may not be. Material that is destined to be thrown away finds itself amongst its figurative counterparts.

Memory Master has a similar visual language to Fringe Nature and Dubious Appeal in the painterly imagery and depictions of nature, a phantasmagorical sequence. However, the works on waving silk represent the memory of places you may have been. The almost mysterious impressionist images are reminiscent of vanishing memories. The Memory Master Tree Installation (2021) plays with the idea that the trees may capture the memories as witnesses of what passes. Since 1988 Jacquie Maria Wessels has been producing this series, which she captures on an analogue 35mm camera.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jacquie Maria Wessels’ work is exhibited worldwide and is included in the collection of several museums, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (NL), Musée de la Photographie Charleroi (BE), Huis Marseille – Museum for Photography Amsterdam (NL), Vincent van GoghHuis (NL) and the Surinamese Museum in Paramaribo (SR). In 2023, Ludion (BE) published the photo book Garage Stills & Fringe Nature.