Friday, January 19, 2018

Justyna Badach: Land of Epic Battles
Light Work Gallery

Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

"Land of Epic Battles" will feature Justyna 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 gun powder as a toner. 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.