Stitches
Eveline Feldmann is a native of Berne, Switzerland and Olja Stipanović was born in Pula, Croatia. Currently they are both residents of Queens, New York. This project and exhibition at the Miroslav Kraljevic Gallery have been conceived from their mutual interest in discourse, mark-making, language, communication and particularly in human skin as the point of contact with the world and surface for inscription.
The skin is our last boundary, at the same time the point of contact and the point of separation from the world. The works of Eveline Feldmann and Olja Stipanovic possess layers and a characteristic reflectivity – in their worldview, in their contemplation of the fragile position of the subject, as well as in their choices of subject and media. Identities are constructed, made, and faked, in constant flux, in a poetical game of history, culture and power. [Marsha Meskimonn: Art of reflection]. Although presented together, the works are autonomous and differ as much as personal histories and characters of the two artists. As such they present two world views united by the idea of skin as a field for exploration of a vast array of physical manifestations (Olja) as well as metaphorical possibilities (Eveline).
Created specifically for the Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic and comparable to her earlier works, installations or as she calls them- sculptural, space situations or temporary architecture – Skin, Retreat, and Trans, – Eveline Feldmann’s new work Peel, was made by stitching and sewing used, emptied, dried, and ironed teabags. From these teabags, Eveline builds ephemeral architecture, transparent membranes that react to draft and air currents stirred by passing visitors and the human presence in the gallery as if they were living and breading. Eveline uses soft, gentle and sensitive materials. The teabags are tangible, tactile and translucent. They are accessible and economical, easy to find in our everyday surroundings, classified as garbage and indicative of Eveline’s ecological consciousness. She merges the formal character of her preferred building material with the symbols that uphold her ideas, the message of her work, and her contextual mission.
The installation Peel is large-scale spiral form, 15 meters long and almost 3 meters high. It consists of three thousand identical elements, transparent tissues stained by tea. The spiral starts from the gallery entrance door, unwinds into the central space, making it active and dynamic, subject to centripetal force. The visitor is detained, enveloped; space and field of vision are saturated, the movements are slowed as the installation itself responds, mimics the movements, breathes. As the skin simultaneously separates and connects the human body with the environment, Peel separates the gallery space but it does not isolate it, it does not completely shut down the sounds and the shadows at the other side of the membrane.
Three thousand teabags mean three thousand cups of tea, a testament to the time spent with friends. As Eveline Feldmann\’s teabag collecting represents her idea, a process almost seven years long, so the tea drinking ritual becomes an inseparable part of the process of artistic creation. On the other hand, Eveline\’s orks can also be understood as collaborations that involve a multitude of partners, her acquaintances, friends, co-workers, even her family in Switzerland who mail her something so easily discarded as garbage… all participate in the collection of the basic building material for her creations.
Olja Stipanović’s work is a photographic series titled Skin Diary. Currently in progress, Skin Diary is a digital chronicle, which documents all the scrapes, bruises, accidental injuries and intrusions on her skin – made over more than two years by new shoes, mosquito bites, sex in uncomfortable places, mishaps, bumping into furniture at night, working with a glue gun, etc. This project is now a continuous digital narrative, a calendar of about 400 individual photographs.
Although these photographs function individually, Olja’s works are sequences. Their narrative mosaic structure and mental montage connections suggest diaristic character and autobiographical chronology. When presented as independent large format prints, these super-macro photographs are especially delicate, tender and fetishistic. The injuries and scars are legible, literally transformed into pictograms by digital media and the proximity to skin it allows. Tracking and meticulously documenting all the individual idiosyncrasies identifies the skin as the perfect multifunctional communication surface that regenerates, documents experiences, and constantly negotiates the flux of information and substances.
About 20 prints of different formats and on different surfaces/papers were made through the use of various printing technologies during the New York Council on the Arts sponsored residency at Alfred University’s Institute for Electronic Arts. There, in April 2005, Olja had the opportunity to, with the help of specialized technicians and newest technology, as well as some now obsolete printers, produce a selection of her photographic diary and explore post-production of her images.
The photographs in Skin Diary, in the context of previous works (Red Memo, Red etc.), can be looked at as self-portraiture/autobiography, where the author positions herself as both the subject and the object, as Self and the Other. Such positioning allows vouyeristic scrutiny emphasized even further by the digital media – its speed, immediacy to the skin surface, where the visual allure and the beauty of the image do not undermine the legibility of the body. The body becomes intelligible as a range of ideological positions that are constructed, as a temporary meeting of the subject and codes on the intersection of social formations and personal history.
Female authors often use their art as means of understanding and coping with situations found in their individual biographies – whether they are traumatic or everyday events. They present visually their individual experiences and reveal their most intimate, detailed, psychological reflections as possible means of regaining power over their own body. A segment of a fragmented body deconstructs the renaissance space and the illusion of depth which the narrative demands as it emphasizes the flat plane of the screen, giving the fragmented body the distinctiveness of a excerpt, icon, symbol or a sign rather than the authority of an assumption. [L. Mulvey: Visual pleasure and narrative cinema].
“Photography also enables a technical perfection of the gaze (through the lens) that can protect the object from aesthetic transfiguration. The photographic gaze has a sort of nonchalance that non-intrusively captures the apparition of objects. It does not seek to probe or analyze reality. Instead, the photographic gaze is “literally” applied on the surface of things to illustrate their apparition as fragments. It is a very brief revelation, immediately followed by the disappearance of the objects.
Through its unrealistic play of visual techniques, its slicing of reality, its immobility, its silence, and its phenomenological reduction of movements, photography affirms itself as both the purest and the most artificial exposition of the image. At the same time, photography transforms the very notion of technique. Technique becomes an opportunity for a double play: it amplifies the concept of illusion and the visual forms. The complicity between the technical device and the world is established. The photographic act consists of entering this space of intimate complicity… Reality found a way to mutate into an image.”
Branka Benčić
Jean Baudrillard: “La Photographie ou l’Ecriture de la Lumiere: Litteralite de l’Image,” in L’Echange Impossible Paris: Galilee, 1999. (Photography or the writing of light )
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