Ján Šipöcz: Zbierka

Ján Šipöcz Zbierka/Collection

The exhibition Zbierka/Collection, like it is apparent from the title, is a presentation of the various collections Ján Šipocz has been placing together and a group of collector’s items, which he managed to acquire. The key and the largest collection is that of crown bottle caps. His brother Matej started the collection and later Ján took it over from him. There are around 15 thousand bottle caps. In 2018 Ján took the time to assort, order and catalogue them. To document them. This work concluded in about 900 various bottle caps.

A series of frames of photographic slides came about as a byproduct of the engraving of photographic slides, which he has been working on for the past 5 years. No one has ever paid much attention to those frames. They are, they were only the carriers, the protection of the important parts – the slides – the thing, which was projected, perceived, viewed. The frames had always remained in the background, assorted in boxes, hidden in the depths of projectors. Ján Šipocz removed the content and he elevated the form to the content, which he formally processed as a poster. The frame sometimes carries information, which was on the removed image, a note from the author, the collection number. A label.

The idea of this process stems from the thematic poster – which has mostly motifs of nature, where all the animals of one species are pictured.

Ján Šipocz used photography as a means of appropriation of a certain object in the series “Airplanes”. During the spring of 2016 he devoted himself to aviation and he documented airplanes landing at the airport. For a while he was truly carried away by planes. The resemblance of airplanes, with small differences in the details, reminds him of an insect collection. The planes are just slightly larger than insects. Instead of a pin to pin them down, he used a camera to photograph them.

Furthermore, the collection contains:

• A pair of scissors for cutting passport photos, bought for 200 CZK at a shop called Fotografia Praha that went out of business. The shop was established when the Prague photographic studios were nationalized. It did well as Fotografia Praha - Družstvo (a cooperative) until the year 2011, when it went out of business. Ján bought the scissors because he was using them in my work at the time, for example in the series Short Stories From The Past /2011/
• A handmade book from a camp in Zlín from 1946
• Cuff links with a nude picture under acrylic glass, a set of two.

The exhibition at Phoinix will last till november 2018