Christian Tomaszewski - Hunting for Pheasants. Le Guern Gallery 10.12.2010

Christian Tomaszewski - Hunting for Pheasants

Le Guern Gallery concludes the 2010 – a year full of turbulence on the political arena – with Hunting for

Pheasants,

a solo exhibition by Chrextensive list of famous, historical assassinations and political murders permanently

engraved in the collective memory.

Hunting for Pheasants, far from being an elegy or a tribute, is a bordering on obsession process of archiving, a

manipulation of context and narrative, a play with the ephemeral nature of memory. Tomaszewski frames the

assassinations in terms of film—there are references to Natural Born Killers, Wild at Heart and James Bond.

Historical facts become a fiction, the fiction becomes a part of the history.

The core of the exhibition is constituted by a group of forty handmade, single-edition posters serving a role

of advertisement for movies that don’t exist, films that were never made. They also speak of a lose affinity

with the once famous Polish Poster School (whose one member coincidentally shares with Tomaszewski his last

name).

Olof Palme, Indira Gandhi, Martin Luther King and others are reincarnated here as tabloid celebrities.

The posters are accompanied by the video collage constructed out of clips and fragmentary materials

appropriated from YouTube, and other more and less trustworthy internet sources. Here again, the strictly

documentary footage blends with celluloid fable.

All of the mentioned above elements extend themselves beyond the limits of their framed, flat surfaces and

enter the real, physical interior of the gallery. Color planes and stripes, lines, textual and graphic elements

continue in space creating a form of maze or labyrinth that defines and restricts the stroll of a viewer, imitating

“seams” and “cuts” of the memory or film editing, bringing about a clash of various, sometimes antithetical

interpretations.

Any American of a certain generation can tell you precisely what banal activity they were performing when

JFK got shot. Similarly, every Pole vividly remembers the moment when the news of the Smolensk tragic airplane

crash was announced. In this context, Tomaszewski’s work extends itself onto a viewer, tying him up in time and

space, while replaying the still frames of momentous historical events imprinted in the body’s memory…

Christian Tomaszewski explores narrative potentials of architecture, space, design, and typography.

Tomaszewski’s work is largely influenced by his interest in cinema and its history. Born in Gdansk, Poland,

Christian Tomaszewski lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited widely in solo and group

exhibitions in the United States and Europe – most recently at Michael Wiesehoefer Gallery in Cologne,

Athens Biennial, Nottingham Contemporary in the UK, and ArtPace in San Antonio, TX among other places.

In 2009, Tomaszewski was selected to create a commissioned project for Performa - New York Biennial

of Performance Art. Tomaszewski is a recipient of numerous grants and awards including past support

form the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the 2008 fellowship from John Simon Guggenheim Memorial

Foundation.