Franciszek Orłowski
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Beginning of a journey
2.06.2010
Stereo Gallery
Small Change
The work documents an action taking place in London and is in a special way tied with emigration. One of the pictures shows the so-called ‘wailing wall’, a place in London where Polish emigrants seek a job, usually a low-paid and illegal one. The artist made a micro-photograph of the place and then employed a micro-mechanic (Przemysław Spychała), who prepared a place within a one-penny coin to hide a microfilm.
The re-assembled coin, with a hardly perceptible hiding place which can yet be pried open again, was put into circulation with a picture inside. Five slides document an ephemeral action; they depict a micro-object, a one-penny coin which has a dual status when again in circulation. It is both a lowest denomination coin and an artefact of an art action, unknown to its fast-changing owners.
Air conditioning
I decided to move a beehive into the gallery with it’s entire bee family. For the safety of visitors at the entrance of the hive I have fitted a plastic tube through which the bees can move freely between their habitat and open space outside the building.
One body, compact, perfect, subordinated to the economy. The queen - a specific command centre, the brain of the organism remains in the gallery (beehive) and the rest of the body penetrates the external space in order to collect from the respective elements, to be processed inside. Pollination process initiates life in the micro scale affecting the macro scale. Bees coming back result in specific condensation of the outer space into inner space. The circulation between one space and the other is also of importance.
That condensation of the inner and outer space, the process of gathering weight makes the work of bees metaphorical as is the process of sculpting, by chemical transformation the accumulated material formed between the patches, which, as we know, are an important biological motif. The shape of the patch, its modularity becomes an inspiration for systems functionalism, architecture, design, from molecular models to the structure of cities.
Consequence of the merge between the "commercial" gallery, the bees, and the artist is the sweet "golden" honey.