Darja Bajagić & Issy Wood

Darja Bajagić’s (b.1990, Podgorica, ME) works adopt strategies of shifting contexts in order to complicate the consumption of images, momentarily deactivating fixed judgements and leaving images open to ulterior connections to free up meaning.   Bajagić’s works concede to the tensions between fascination and revulsion, pleasure and disgust, and to the redemptive quality of humour in light of the heinous.  “Bajagić might be less interested in the accountability of images than the driving need to make them so”.

At Régence, Bajagić will show a new group of collages, as well as Nobody Knows I’m Funny (Bianca Brust, Maddy O’ Reilly, Kali Michaels).   In this work, Kali and Maddy’s heads exist as the faces of Comedy and Tragedy, touching upon Bianca’s story and her love affair with Matthias Schooremann from black metal band Carpe Noctem.   Schooremann murdered and decapitated Bianca after she attempted to break off their relationship, then photographed Bianca’s body and head in different poses before posting the images on an online gore forum.  Schooremann later committed suicide by crashing his car, with Bianca’s head in the passenger seat, zipped up in a backpack.  The images of Bianca were taken down by Schoormann before he committed suicide, but had already been absorbed by the internet and disseminated online in various different sites.  The heads are framed in a Celtic border, an ancient religious pattern appropriated by predominantly male white supremacist groups.  The workis accompanied by a small publication where Bajagić has copied-and-pasted a comments thread in reply to the set of images of Bianca posted on the Best Gore website.

Issy Wood (b.1993, North Carolina, USA) works primarily in painting and in text.  Though her writing mostly takes place under wraps, it serves as a kind of quiet script for the paintings' resultant scenes.  In image making Wood probes ideas of drama, gender, physique and costume, finding the horror and the humdrum in everything from Pointillism to Sex and the City. 

Most of the bodies in question fall just short of proper historical or sexual identity, instead appearing smothered with jewellery or ornaments in and of themselves.