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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 production—the 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 unscathed—a
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 Bierstedt’s 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 Carl’s drawn clichés announce and interpret
themselves as landscape—she 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
art—treating 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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