Natalie Czech: One can’t have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.

CRAC Alsace presents the exhibition of Natalie Czech ‘One can’t have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it’. The exhibition brings together an important group of works part of different series such as Critic‘s Bouquet (2015), Poems by Repetition (2013-2014), Il pleut by Guillaume Apollinaire (2012-2014), Voyelles (2013-2015), Hidden Poems (2010-2012) and to [icon] (2015-2016), among others. This exhibition highlights issues regarding her research based on a deconstruction of relations between language and image, text and sign, writing and photography well as authorship concerns through collaborative works.

With her new series to [icon], she plays tongue-in-cheek with the “iconic turn” of our society and the complex nature of meaning. Natalie Czech‘s photographs reveal that the meaning of an icon (computer symbols that we use all day long) is established through actions in the real world and thus through a transfer from the noun “icon” to the verb “to [icon]”. The markings visualize new contexts in the existing image material. It is nor a second neither a third text that Natalie Czech finds (unlike Hidden Poems, Poems by Repetition or Critic‘s Bouquet), but a “second image” rendered visible and readable by adding a colored, artificial resin form to the photograph.