About Justyna Badach
Justyna Badach’s photography work is engaging and layered. Her processes add context and tension to the content she explores. Two of her recent photograph series, Epic Film Stills and Land of Epic Battles, are shown here. These bodies of work expose the ideals embedded in what seem like beautiful or heroic landscapes. The images are sublime and gripping. Through further decoding, we learn that these two series are distinct yet harmonious studies on themes of masculinity, power, and control.
Epic Film Stills by Justyna Badach
In Epic Film Stills, Badach captures frames from mainstream American cinema, particularly patriotic films and westerns. Badach, who was born in the Soviet Union and emigrated to the United States, was first introduced to American culture through film and mass media. She always felt a sense of alienation with the films, and yet they were both vehicle and teacher; it was in part through them she learned our values and our language. As she photographs projections of the films, Badach carefully selects frames of landscapes that are void of figures. In doing this she not only mimics the processes of the film editor, she symbolically engages in the process of staking claim to land, and touches on the American ideology of manifest destiny. Badach's Epic Film Stills are curved and mounted behind plexiglass. They are visually seductive and encompassing – they are contemporary art pieces that come towards viewers. Images in the series are grouped by type: sunrise/sunset, mountain/valleys, and desert/plateau. These themes were selected by the artist with the intention to parallel found frames to motifs in 19th century luminous paintings.
Land of Epic Battles by Justyna Badach
A new and ongoing body of work, Land of Epic Battles similarly pulls stills from sourced footage. Though less mainstream and far darker, the stills in Land of Epic Battles come from a widely available source: the internet. This series focuses on the hyper-masculine, violent world of ISIS recruitment videos, discovered through YouTube and private, encrypted Internet subscription channels. These videos are available on demand through any internet portal, and exemplify the larger global proliferation of digital “info-war” visuals that negate traditional guides of legality, and question the morality of mass-media content. On the surface, what they depict is not so dis-similar to mainstream movie scenes or sequences. They often employ sophisticated tools and visual vocabulary of virtual video games, reality TV, or DIY videos, and carry catchy titles. Again, the presentation or means of the work is meaningful, and these modern art prints are themselves charged. Badach discovered a way to use gunpowder as a pigment to create hand-made casein dichromate prints.
Together, Epic Film Stills and Land of Epic Battles use visual constructs against themselves. We are left reassessing our engagement with mass media, and urged to more fully decode what we find heroic or idyllic before we embrace it.
Related Video: Artist Justyna Badach discusses her contemporary photography.
Light Work (2018 exhibition video) is pleased to present Land of Epic Battles a solo exhibition of prints by Philadelphia-based artist Justyna Badach. Land of Epic Battles features Badach’s new series of large, hand-made dichromate prints, made using film stills from ISIS training videos. For a year she experimented with darkroom techniques before discovering a 19th-century process that would allow her to use gunpowder as a pigment. The resulting incendiary prints initially look like antiquated documentation of Middle Eastern sites and landscapes. The texture of the heavy-weight watercolor paper needed for this process adds a layer of abstraction more akin to the language of drawing and painting than photography. Rather than using images of carnage and gore, for which ISIS videos are infamous, Badach’s edit reveals a vast, enduring, and majestic landscape that dwarfs the players in the conflict and exposes the futility of war. Land of Epic Battles continues Badach’s ongoing interest in male culture and the machismo of Hollywood films and media. As a child, Badach emigrated from Poland and learned to speak English by watching American TV. Fascinated by the deeply coded American cinema, she later created Epic Film Stills, a project that explored how classic Westerns such as Wyatt Earp and Young Guns glorify the violence of American colonialism. In this series, Epic Film Stills, she focuses on the landscape, which echoes the romanticized version of Manifest Destiny and its violent ideology that she first recognized in American Westerns and which may, in turn, be the lens through which most Americans make sense of Middle Eastern terrorism. In describing this body of work Badach states: “My work examines the transmutation of history and repackaging of violence through appropriation and re-contextualization of images derived from films created for a male audience. Land of Epic Battles focuses on the hyper-masculine world of ISIS recruitment videos that have grown out of the social and cultural voids that mark this moment in time.” Besides armored vehicles, the black ISIS flag, artillery, and explosives, each ISIS cell includes a media-savvy creative, equipped with video camera, microphones, laptop, and Final Cut Pro, who carefully documents the destruction wrought by this cell and disseminates this material on encrypted websites and YouTube. Reality TV, DIY citizen-journalism, and video games (specifically Grand Theft Auto) have clearly inspired these works. ISIS videographers carefully edit the action with rousing music and linger in slow motion over point-blank gunshots, beheadings, and crucifixions. Voice-overs promise a life of respect, power, comradery, and victory for young men who have been brutally marginalized and stripped of culture. http://lg.ht/LandofEpicBattles — Justyna Badach’s family arrived as refugees in the United States in 1980. She currently resides in Philadelphia, where she is an artist, educator, and museum professional. Her work has been exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad and is in the permanent collections of Cranbrook Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Museet for Fotokunst Brandts, Odense, Denmark. Her artist book is in the Special Collection at the Rice University Library, Houston, TX, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA and Haverford College. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including; Queensland College of Art Griffith University in Brisbane, Art Wonderland Space in Copenhagen and the Temple of Hadrian in Rome to most notably in the US at the Corcoran Gallery, D.C., Portland Art Museum, James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA, and Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago among others. Badach participated in the residency program at Light Work in 2012. http://justynabadach.com — Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media http://daylightblue.com Light Work http://lightwork.org Music: "Sleepers" by Sergey Cheremisinov
