Congratulations to Justyna Badach, whose work has been selected for inclusion in “Monumental.” Presented through the public spaces of The Photography Show presented by AIPAD. This onsite exhibition “offers attendees an opportunity to view the possibilities of grand scale photography and to showcase artists working in an expansive approach to the medium.”
Diplomatic Pressure is one of a limited number of unique works the artist has executed using a 19th Century photographic printing process and explosives. Badach has modified the historic dichromate printing technique that traditionally uses watercolor and substituted it with gunpowder for the pigment. The resulting images have uniquely rich surface that resembles a charcoal drawing. Imagery from the Proxy War series addresses the systematic destruction brought on by US-Russian military activities in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The work examines the vast troves of internet war propaganda and asks us to consider the framework for images we identify as heroic. Diplomatic Pressure purports to show a US missile attack on Syria executed in retaliation for the gassing of innocent civilians by their own government. Tragically, the attack ended up targeting the very civilians whom it claimed to defend. As with much information found online, the true source, location and veracity of these images is unknown, as they are often stand-ins visuals pulled from from vast libraries of available visual data that is appropriated and re-edited.
Proxy War follows an earlier series, Land of Epic Battles, where Badach drew source material from ISSIS recruitment videos disseminated via YouTube. Badach’s interests lay in the visual strategies employed in the contemporary digital info war and the ubiquitous history of war imagery as art, including the monumental paintings by Delacroix and the staged post-battle images of the American civil war by Timothy O’Sullivan. By utilizing appropriation and gun powder to produce images, Badach is positioning her practice squarely in the post-modernist canon of artist such as Ed Ruscha who routinely combine the language of photographic images with unconventional art materials to create tension and new meaning.
Badach emigrated to the US as a young girl where she was introduced to American culture through film and mass media. For Badach and millions of others across the globe, mass media is the primary vehicle and teacher of American culture and language. Her work urges a reassessment of our engagement with mass-media and a more careful reading of images which are often imbued with voyeurism and the alienating machoism of Hollywood.