EXHIBITION
2nd year presentation, 2023
In this group of works I explore the nuclear family as a postmodern, Western ideal – the gender roles and colonial implications coming with it, the habitus produced by class background, the way in which consumption infiltrates and defines identity.
The central work “Vouchers” is an incomplete list of activities (or perhaps requests) that on the one hand can be attributed both to a somewhat outdated ideal of fatherhood in a rural or suburban region. On the other hand this list relates to a bourgeois group who can buy into the same idealized life-style and thus establish a crafted connection to their roots, the soil and nature.
Some boxes are unlabelled and I have added “eating burgers” (as a reference to a globalized everyday life) or “baking bread” (as a more feminine, domestic activity) to break with a possible definitive interpretation of the list. After all, lifestyles can also be marketed or “given away” by purchase.
Two wine bottle bags (Gift 2, Gift 3) that I found stand as a feminine-connoted counterpart to the wall of gifts described above. I gave them seemingly incomplete heads made of papier-mâché to replace the missing faces of the hyper-aestheticized female bodies on the print. The faces give them an expression of protest against the bags they’re caught in i.e. their own bodies.
A further wine bottle (Gift 1) carries an oil-painted copy of a room spray on its surface. From it emerges a thin wooden stick with a conifer cone, formally reminiscent of a toilet brush. The silhouette of the product coincides with the female figures on Gift 2 & 3 and refers to a culture that sells an escape from everyday life in the form of an air freshener with a “tropical scent” – while the packaging still contains the domestic cone.
Opposite of „Gift 1“ leans “To-Do”, an outline of a pine tree growing in central European monoculture forests featuring a graphic Hawaiian flower pattern, thickly applied with oil paint. Local and global, work and vacation, domestic and exotic.
With the work “Moved” I show rather plain pencil drawings, vertically arranged, starting from the floor – reminding of measures used to record the height of children. From the smallest animal at the bottom to the elephant hanging almost at eye level, all the animals are shells – puppets with hands inside that animate and move them.