Jolanta Marcolla, False Mirror, 1980, color photography, edition B 1/1

Jolanta Marcolla (b. 1950) graduated from the Painting Department of the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, where she received her diploma in 1974. While still a student, together with Zdzislaw Sosnowski, Dobroslaw Baginski and Janusz Haka, she founded Galeria Sztuki Aktualnej [Gallery of  Current Art], which organized avant-garde events both at home and abroad.

After her studies, she took a job at the Wrocław Feature Film Studio, which provided her with access to professional equipment and materials. This allowed her to develop her artistic experiments, exploring and expanding the possibilities of new media. In her works, created mainly in the mediums of photography and film, Marcolla analyzed the reality surrounding her, interested not only in its image, but also in the very process of transferring and transforming this reality by means of technology. She paid particular attention to the errors, distortions and understatements that occurred during these processes.

One example of her experimental approach is the work False Mirror from 1980. In a series of photographs depicting a lamp and its reflection in a mirror, the two forms appear, at first glance, identical. On closer inspection, however, the incongruity between the power cord and its reflection becomes apparent. This visual paradox disturbs the perception of reality and provokes questions about the source of the inconsistency, as well as about the limits of perception and the veracity of the images we perceive.

Paulina Olszewska