Gallery WM has the supreme pleasure to present the new photographic project by WM’s founder, Wanda Michalak, together with Australian photographer Debb Mills. This project is the result of both Michalak’s photographic attempt at coming to terms with the pandemic limitations of the last two and a half years, as well as a reaction to an invasive eye-operation that has, to all intents and purposes – hopefully temporarily – warped her vision.

Things and situations may appear closer or further than they really are, patches of mini-blindness occur at inopportune moments and heretofore straight lines become wavy and bendy. The development of metamorphopsia involves structural changes in the retina of the eye as well as processing changes in the cerebral cortex of the brain. Metamorphopsia can present itself as unbalanced vision, resulting from small unintentional movements of the eye as it tries to stabilize the field of vision. It can also lead to the misrepresentation of an object’s size or shape. This kind of distorted vision would be scary for any person, let alone a photographer whose work depends on eyesight. Compound this with a cloistered existence, an absence of people around her, of support, a crippled city, and the general feeling of isolation the pandemic has brought upon us, and the feeling must have been terrifying.

Nonetheless, Michalak took to the medium she knows best, and started compiling a body of work that set out to translate not only those feelings of segregation and solitude, but also how reality looks to her now; warped vision, warts and all. What we see now, on the gallery walls, are fragments of sight, broken shards of background and foreground, warped ways of seeing. At the same time, in the alcove midway through the gallery, Debb Mills’ close-up images of that most daintily elegant of insects, the dragonfly, serve as a sparklingly humorous counterpart to Michalak’s darker, nearly constructivist reorganisations taken from the interior of her home. In a sense, Mill’s dancing dragons taken so obsessively in close-up, are also the result of tunnel-, or warped, vision. This is a distorted reality reconstructed, a making sense of a limited world ruled by metamorphopsia – a warped vision.

Wanda Michalak will be present at the opening on Saturday the 3rd of September from 17:00 – 19:00 hrs at Gallery WM

Image announcement copyright Wanda Michalak