Garage Sills Jacquie Maria Wessels

Garage Stills

For her 'Garage Stills' project Wessels is looking for traditional car repair garages all over the world. She is fascinated and intrigued by the shapes and colours of the mysterious, to her completely unknown objects she discovers in this wonderful world. With the found attributes she creates still lifes on the spot, which she captures with an analogue camera. By extracting the objects from their natural function and arranging them in a completely new way, Wessels gives them a totally different dimension in her surprising compositions. The poetic Garage Stills with challenging colour formations and investigative staging have an attractive beauty, but are also a document of a disappearing world.

Wessels approaches this series with her documentary background in mind, however she takes the liberty in this male dominated world of rough-around-the-edges garages to move objects or to remove them and to light her staged still life. In the interiors of the old garages she found in Cambodia, Cuba, Italy, Morocco, the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey, Russia, South-Africa, Japan and Sri Lanka, she stages her newly discovered materials into a collage-like image. All garages seem to have the same stereotypical elements. Only at second glance does the viewer discover small cultural differences that can be found in the details. The still lifes that arise subsequently are remarkable in terms of colour and often have a playful appeal.

Because of science and technical development, cars have developed into computer-controlled machines. As a result, the former 'personal and organized chaos' in the garages is being replaced by sterile order, as a result of which contemporary garages increasingly start to resemble scientific laboratories. The traditional garages where manual labour is still central are slowly dying out. In the Garage Stills series you can feel the presence of the mechanics even though they are not in the picture, the atmosphere and the hustle and bustle of their working environment are frozen in a fixed picture. The old garages, which previously stood for progress and are now being overtaken by new technologies, have been recorded in this series before they will disappear.

From time to time Wessels began to capture the garages’ environment by looking for the meagre bits of nature in the immediate vicinity. With the intensive work in the garages, Wessels looked forward to nature in the long run - the counterpart of the car industry, which in some places even slowly takes over the old garages.

Works from the 'Garage Stills' series are included in the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (NL), Musée de la Photograhie Charleroi (Belgium) and Huis Marseille, the museum for photography in Amsterdam (NL). The 'Garage Stills' were on show in a solo exhibition at Musée de la Photograhie Charleroi (BE), at the Rijkmuseum Amsterdam (NL) in the group exhibition 'New Horizons - Modern Photography at the Rijksmuseum', in the Photo Route Staatsliedenbuurt Amsterdam (NL) and in a solo exhibition at the contemporary art museum PAN | Palazzo delle Arti di Napoli in Italy and were among others on show at Galerie Baudelaire in Antwerpen. Furthermore they were selected for the group exhibition 'Photography Extended', which showed the latest development in the area of Dutch staged photography in Museum het Valkhof in Nijmegen and were chosen for the photography festival Encontros da Imagem 2017 in Braga (Portugal), with a special presentation. In March 2023, Ludion (Brussels, BE) published the photography book ‘Garage Stills & Fringe Nature’.

Garage Stills

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