The material featured in her exhibition entitled Can’t Get It engages the problematic of subjective attention, interpretation and perception versus reality: where is the meeting point between the subject and the world of phenomena? Things and what we think about them are not one and the same; the dimension of forms as perceived by our senses generates the thoughts we experience as reality. The exhibited works aim to explore the spectrum that ranges from the reflex for direct, intellectual interpretation – which operates with definitions – to intuitive cognition.
In her displayed works, Hajnalka Tarr utilizes tools that, according to consensus, serve the description and interpretation of reality. The central piece of the exhibition is a butterfly collection consisting of 12 boxes (80×100 cm each), whose variously shaped “specimens” are cut-outs from the pages of the Concise Hungarian Explanatory Dictionary. The dozen boxes together form a sentence made of butterflies: “Can’t get it”. The work points to the nature of the phenomenal plane – because of its constant changeability and conditioned quality – as ungraspable along the lines of definitions and rational interpretation, even if these methods are necessary and of great use to us in finding our way in the world. In speaking of her work, Hajnalka Tarr points out: “Rational interpretation in itself is unsuitable for grasping things in their wholeness just as collecting butterflies and impaling them on pins will not cause us to possess “butterfliness”.
The other tool employed by Hajnalka Tarr in her representation of rationality is geometry. In her 16-piece series entitled Subjective Reality Structures, she combines the objectivity of the line and the point with a photograph depicting the sea. The 16 pieces of the series and the drawing created by bringing them together constitute the artist’s structural model of how we know the things of reality. The sea as a thing also comprises the subject of further examinations as the theme of two other works in the exhibition: the aforementioned photo of the sea was also used as the raw material for a woven picture and is also featured on the cards of a tarot deck. Given that the sea is a culturally loaded concept, whose definability is rather problematic, as all of its properties (colour, shape, size) comes from the outside, it is highly suitable theme for Hajnalka Tarr’s purposes of presenting it not only as the subject, but also the symbol, of exploration.