Wednesday 29th October, Friday 31st Oct & Saturday 1 Nov, 1-6pm, St Luke’s Community Centre, 90 Central Street, London EC1V 8AJ

Julie Rafalski is a Polish- American artist who has been based in London for the past 20 years.

From the artist:

This series of 100 photographs depicts details of the interior of my grandmother’s house in Poland and explores the memory of my experience of that house in childhood. I visited this house yearly in the 80s and it was a place where time flowed differently. It was an analogue world in which socks were darned, the black and white television set with two channels ended programming at midnight and visitors would come for a morning tea break and stay until the evening. Now when I return to this familiar childhood place, I can still sense fragments and atmospheres of that other world that has now disappeared. Memories surface there – I am neither in the past nor the present, but in a space of limbo. Over the years I have inhabited the house more in my memory than in actuality. Through the process of memory, this place keeps growing over time and transforms into a familiar yet strange place.

The photographs in this series explore melancholy at the transience of things, longing for a way of being and seeing and an ever-shifting memory. That era is gone, the events are gone, the people are gone and I too am no longer the same I. Memory persists, though it shifts and morphs, constantly in process.

This series can be seen as a portrait of my grandmother as well as a landscape of a domestic space. Fragments of the interior which she once inhabited still hold traces of her presence: cushion covers she sewed, curtains she hung, objects she collected, flowers she planted. Each shot incorporates a viewfinder, which frames a fragment or detail of the interior, while obscuring others. The abstract space created by the viewfinders prompts the viewer to use their imagination to fill in the rest of the image and to imagine how the objects and interior elements in each image might relate to those of another image and to imagine a continuous interior. The colour palette relates to the colours in the house as well as to remembered objects from that time period.
-Julie Rafalski

More about Julie Rafalski: https://www.julierafalski.com/

Instagram: @julie.rafalski

Remaining days: Wednesday 29th, Friday 31st Oct. & Saturday 1 Nov 

1-6pm

(To see the exhibition outside these times, please email: info@julierafalski.com)

St Luke’s Community Centre, 90 Central Street, London EC1V 8AJ