FLACHE
WELT
Ina Bierstedt, Bettina Carl, Alena
Meier
31 July 09 August 2003, open Thurs, Fri 1-5 pm,
Sat 12-4 pm
preview Wednesday, 30 July 2003, 6 pm
rm 103, 1st floor, Achilles House Cnr Commerce St and
Custom St East, Auckland, NZ
2-19 September 2003, open Tues-Fri 12-4 pm
preview Monday, 1 September 2003, 5.30 pm
Ramp Gallery, Waikato Institute of Technology, Gate
2, Collingwood St, Hamilton, NZ
This is a picture show, an exhibition for which the
visually novel has failed to turn up. The new will not
make a rare appearance here. Instead, in literal senses
and through articulations of familiarity and cliché,
found material dominates the exhibited work of Berlin-based
artists Ina Bierstedt, Bettina Carl and Alena Meier.
Flache Welt (trans. flat earth) suggests some general
strains in contemporary picture making and art productionthe
notion of burying occidental perspective in abstract
painting, for example, or that of the screen a
surface of mediation whose flatness threatens the material
or the original. To some it is simply a state of mind.
At a stretch, the contemplation of flatness may allow
us to imagine life on a saucer. We might simply cut
a hole and crawl from Auckland to Berlin and back again.
Perhaps a renaissance in flat thinking is developing;
while today's technology bluffs the erasure of obstacles
such as physical distance and the features of geophysical
terrain, these measures of spatiality return unscatheda
phenomenon which is probably also applicable to the
dynamics of power in relation to sovereign states and
borderless corporate entities.
A common feature in these artists' work is an imaging
of the desire to control, to comprehend or to remember.
Nostalgia for space, landscape and beauty constitutes
one focus in Ina Bierstedts work A horse of another
colour senior citizens home, 3rd floor,
(2003). These depictions of ageing photo-jigsaws were
shot in a retirement home and are accompanied by a slither
of chocolate bars snaking across the floor. Alena Meier
shows Painter's Working Material, (2003)a series
of images that explore the question of cause and effect,
of coincidence and authorship in the act of producing
photos and paintings. A second work plays with European
art tradition too; a projection of two anecdotes about
failed painting production. Flat can also connote something
easily accessible or smooth, features that we expect
from a stereotype. In When the typical is new, (2003),
Bettina Carls drawn clichés announce and
interpret themselves as landscapeshe plays with
the figurative at the same time as introducing a set
of abstract formal samples. Or is she covering
the conventions of occidental painting? For Carl, drawing
is not simply the tracing or persecuting of form for
the sake of digression, it also collects our expectations
of arttreating them literally, performing them.
Flache Welt is generously supported by the Goethe Institut
Inter Nationes Wellington, and rm103 is generously supported
by Creative New Zealand.
http://www.rm103.org/Capri/install/Cinstl.htm
http://ramp.mediarts.net.nz/
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