A Parallel Planets piece by Unknown
Parallel Planets presents Michal Macků
in Altered Emulsions and Exposed Emotions
Story by Joy Celine Asto
Mentioned: altering emulsions, photographing raw emotions, and experimenting with nudity
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Creative minds have long been exploring the various facets of humanity, and much has been done and made to explain the plethora of emotions bombarding the human heart and mind. Of all these artistic explorations, the works of Czech photographer Michal Macků are certainly one of the most thought-provoking ones I've seen in recent times.
While it's probably not surprising that photographic paper is his chosen medium, it's how he works with it that will demand your attention. After exposing and fixing the film, Michal separates the gelatin emulsion from the paper backing and proceeds to altering the developed image as he pleases, often snipping, slashing, moving it around, and putting together an assembly of several negatives to endow them with new meaning. He calls this technique and the series he has been making out of it since the end of 1989, "gellage," a portmanteau of "gelatin" and "collage."
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| by Michal Macků |
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| by Michal Macků |
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| by Michal Macků |
Of all the mind-blowing pieces Michal has made so far through this laborious method, the most compelling ones for me are the ripped and slashed portraits. His subjects, aside from being exposed in their nakedness, also seemingly strip themselves bare of all other emotions but anxiety, rage, and self-hate. Depression and self-harm have always been subjects explored through riveting and sometimes controversial artworks, and Michal's gellages prove to be among those that effortlessly get the message across.
His other gellage assemblies are also just as gripping and provocative. Looking at his manipulations of the human body -- mostly his own, in fact -- in its nakedness, I think about all other delicate yet arresting issues like loss, identity crisis, helplessness, disability, sexuality, and even mindless conformity. I like how his altered images seem to paint a different picture for each viewer, yet all of them exposing a side of humanity that we're nonetheless all familiar with.
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| by Michal Macků |
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| by Michal Macků |
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| by Michal Macků |
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| by Michal Macků |
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| by Michal Macků |
On his work, Michal Macků says:
"I use the nude human body (mostly my own) in my pictures. Through the photographic process [of Gellage], this concrete human body is compelled to meet with abstract surroundings and distortions. This connection is most exciting for me and helps me to find new levels of humanness in the resulting work.
"My work places 'body pictures' in new situations, new contexts, new realities, causing their 'authentic' reality to become relative. I am interested in questions of moral and inner freedom. I do what I feel, and only then do I begin to meditate on what the result is. I am often surprised by the new connections I find in it."
"I use the nude human body (mostly my own) in my pictures. Through the photographic process [of Gellage], this concrete human body is compelled to meet with abstract surroundings and distortions. This connection is most exciting for me and helps me to find new levels of humanness in the resulting work.
"My work places 'body pictures' in new situations, new contexts, new realities, causing their 'authentic' reality to become relative. I am interested in questions of moral and inner freedom. I do what I feel, and only then do I begin to meditate on what the result is. I am often surprised by the new connections I find in it."
More from Michal Macků
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