Exhibition "how the blue grows out of the cracked concrete"

Laura Jane Nagel at Galerie Nichts/Arthur e. V.

A deep blue gets under your skin,
bursts forth, and breaks you open.
My blue grows out of your shades of gray.
Until you no longer know what space and time are.
Until you no longer know where you begin and where the city ends.

The works shown in this exhibition combine imagery from Chemnitz with the historical cyanotype process.
Over the course of the year, an exploratory engagement with this technique gave rise to a series of works in which different approaches and creative possibilities were tested and combined.
Although architecture and urban spaces initially seem to take center stage, the images primarily tell the story of the people who fill these places with life and shape them. It is the traces of their presence—which have become intertwined with the city’s concrete structures—that give the motifs their meaning.
By combining photography and cyanotype—with its characteristic shades of blue and white—a perspective on the city emerges that oscillates between the present and memory, documentation and interpretation. This lends the motifs a distinct, sometimes elusive sense of temporality, with individual and collective experiences at its core.