Mark Bartkiw’s collages reflect a distorted reality

Mark Bartkiw’s work reflects my ongoing fascination with the construction of imaginary worlds that mirror a distorted reality. These fictional tableaus are reflective of inner states of mind and responsive to world issues. The camera is used for its ability to record actual visual information and create a level of familiarity. The photographer uses a variety of collage methods, sometimes in the building of a photographic source, sometimes in post-production. In all cases, he is playing with scale shifts and unsettling points of view. In Uncommonplace, Bartkiw is imagining a world similar to ours but with a completely different history and evolution. In making this work, he can invent what that kind of world would look like and can compare and contrast it to our world.

Bartkiw put together photos taken from different parts of our world to create this alternate reality, one that is similar to our world but with enough difference to create uncertainty. He sees these images as a lucid dream that reflect our own distortions and interpretations of what we see. We make assumptions or judgement based on first glance. This remanufacturing of landscape and architecture results in objects and buildings that float in a slightly skewed space. Reassembling reality based on the experience of multiple places and locations creates new spaces that verge on recognizable, but defy definition. This process of reinterpreting the world is something that Bartkiw do to feel more at home in the world. But the new world we create puts us on the wrong side of the mirror, looking back at the reflection of our ever-shifting psyches.