ELIZA GALEY Illusion

Opening: 23.03.2012, opening hour: 18.00

Open until: 20.04.2012

Eliza Galey is an artist from Lublin connected with the Biała Gallery since making her artistic debut in 2000 as part of the Young Forum of Art. Since then she has created her own very distinctive style. Her main source of inspiration is the Braille alphabet, which over the years has become her trademark. She creates white perforated drawings with a metal plate used to write in Braille. The fact that the works are barely visible creates a peculiar perception barrier.

Confronted with Galey’s pictures we are required to engage other senses besides the sense of sight into the act of perception. The bulges provoke us to start reading those works also with our fingers. Touching the barely tangible spots we start “seeing” the unseen. Moving our hand back and forth, we change the perspective of looking at the pictures and try to comprehend the overall shape. During this process we gradually start engaging other senses as well, because after a while we start hearing the rustle of our fingerprints moving swiftly across the Braille dots. The blind Louis Braille saw more in 1829, while creating the extraordinary protuberant alphabet for the blind.

In consequence, this peculiar technique of artistic expression treats the sense of touch as a means of reception of the art, reinterpreting the visual aspect of a picture as only one of the possible ways of “seeing”. This individual, intimate perception helps Galey let the viewer in her world. The world filled with autobiographical elements like the images of women from her family (her mother, grandmother and her daughter), the feeling of alienation or some unrevealed memories. We find there traces of phobias, obsessions and difficult, hidden emotions, which accompany us every day.

What’s interesting, the starting point for taking up Braille typography was working with fingerprints. Galey’s first works presented her fingerprints transferring her personal identity onto paper, fabric and other things, from which she created ornamented objects or installations. The next stage in her carrier was creating sculptures with large Braille dots making it possible to feel them. They lead the artists to engraving images on paper with a metal plate and a graver. In 2005 Galey started making films that, when screened on top of the drawings seem to naturally complement them.

With the present exhibition entitled Złudzenie / Illusion, Eliza Galey touches problems connected with difficult memory. Memory that haunts you, that is impossible be erased. She turns away from her senses choosing not-hearing, not-speaking, not-seeing, not-feeling. Her black and white reality becomes a unique physical alphabet of perception, something we need to feel alive. With the use of her works the artists invites us to set on a voyage of discovery. Through the symbolic elimination of our basic senses, she wants us to get back to our true, pure emotionality.

Therefore, Eliza Galey’s art plays therapeutic role both for the artist herself and for the visitor of the gallery. It makes us get in touch with our difficult emotions, those that burden us, but at the same time make us who we are. Here they become the catalyst for elementary and unambiguous images presented on photographic self-portraits, fragments of films made in places that are significant for the author. The exhibition presents a collection of images, on which a photo or a film accompanies the Braille character. It does not mean, however, that the artist has replaced her trademark means of expression with another media. Quite on the contrary, it is still the basis, on which she builds her next artistic solutions.