DRAUGHT | Jon Derganc: Lightroom
Exhibition curator: Vladimir Vidmar
In his work, Jon Derganc draws suggestive analogies between reflection on the material conditions and premises of the medium of photography and that on the specifics of its representational potential. In its basic gesture, Derganc’s practice is a certain rejection of photography’s “outward” orientation, i.e., its indexical, documentary function, a rejection expressed in the artist’s consistent refusal to provide solid cues for the viewer, most apparent where the material qualities of a photographic print overlap with its visual effect.
Starting from such premises, the Lightroom exhibition introduces a certain exterior – a series of eight photographs of overcast skies – into the gallery space purportedly emptied of the exterior, the traditional white cube. The fact that the images represent the sky is mostly unclear, since the photographs look like gray monochromes from a distance, while close up they display the graininess of a photographic print. The photographs are hung in a steady rhythm, at equal distances from one another, encompassing the viewer on three of the four walls. The space is illuminated with similar uniformity with white light at 5000K, which is generally used for art prints and is considered the most “neutral” variant for reproducing daylight.
Lightroom thus creates a certain outside inside. It does this in an explicitly nonmimetic way by highlighting the artifice. It pretends to simulate a natural environment, while in reality it simulates the photographic environment. This way, it draws a parallel between two registers: the relation between the exterior and the interior in photography, and the relation between the outside and the inside in the context of the exhibition space, or perhaps even art itself. Just as the puffy clouds and the graininess of the photographic print both enhance and destabilize one another, so do the light of a sunny day at noon and the light produced by standard CIE D50 lighting confront and undermine one another. This phenomenological flickering is not about some general relativism or solipsism, but about testing boundaries. On the one hand, the limits of photography itself are being tested, which thus become the object of photographic representation; on the other, the (in)ability of the exhibition space to enable a certain experience becomes the principle of building a poetic system with its own rules.
If we continue with analogies, we could say that while a darkroom is used for developing photographs, Lightroom is there to deconstruct photography. Not surprisingly, therefore, the spiritus movens of this exhibition is the monochrome – the point that in art traditionally symbolizes the end of depth and the birth of infinity.
-----------------------------------------------------
Jon Derganc lives and works in Ljubljana. He graduated from ALUO in Ljubljana in 2011. He completed his master's thesis in 2014 in Kolkata, India. He works predominantly in the photographic medium; film and digital. His work explores the limits of photography's ability to represent the world objectively, while at the same time exploring its ability to transform the photographic representation into a new – photographic – reality.
