One of the first pieces I intended to make for this exhibition was a very large photograph of a field of rapeseed spreading across the horizon. The inspiration came from an old wives’ tale that scolded children for looking at a flowering field of rapeseed in the sun. They say that a person can be blinded by looking at bright yellow rapeseed in the stark glare of the sun. I enjoyed the suggestion of visual violence that this phrase carried with it.
For one reason or another, I decided not to make the piece, but I still wanted to use the phrase in the exhibition title, until I realized that the name of this yellow flower in English is ‘rape’, conjuring up the phrase, ‘Don’t look at rape in the sunshine’. I couldn’t very well use that as the title of my upcoming exhibition.
After some time, the only element that remained of my initial concept was colour. The colour yellow, the colour of bile. To select the specific shade I was looking for, I perused a sampler at a shopping centre. One particularly bold hue stood out, alarmingly yellow with a certain rotten quality about it. Numbered 1021 on the RAL colour chart, it turned out that this particular shade of yellow was generally referred to as RAPE YELLOW.
Don’t look at rape in the sunshine.
Witek Orski (born 1985) in Warsaw. Orski studied Philosophy at the University of Warsaw, and Photography at the University of the Arts in Poznań. He is also a lecturer at the Art Academy of Szczecin. Along with Janek Zamoyski, in 2010 Orski launched the independent photography gallery Czułość in Warsaw. He lives and works in Warsaw
