ARTIST STATEMENT ABOUT WORK FROM 2006-2008
My work from 2006-2009 deals with association themes of still life tradition and fetishism and supplementary different perspectives on post war design. I was using simple ways of reproduction as a starting point and was playing with moments and aesthetics of exaggerated reality.The everyday object is reproduced in a well-chosen material constructing new and different ways of seeing it as a three-dimensional sign. The material it is cast-in and the place it is represented-on contains meaning and a specific perspective on the role the object can play for us in the routine of everyday life.
Bread casted in aluminium, one of the most artificial metal you can use. Aluminium, known as one of the reasons to get Alzheimer. Heavy bread! It is sitting on the right top of a sill like slide just at the point to either make the windowsill shift to the right or to be sliding back to the left. Moment of instability and change just stopped for know and forever, a sculptural sign for just that: ‘things end’.
In my sculptural work are display and object both evenly relevant parts of the sign I produce. There I construct associations around the everyday object of the domestic space and the disregarded object in the public space.
The everyday object stands, almost like a mediator, between our human bodies and the environment we are living in. We are dealing with those things by using them to function within our society.
Food even more can be a symbol for how we are dealing with our own bodies. It goes through us, we consume and incorporate it. Unconsciously or consciously we are influencing our human nature by the way we choose to use and consume food.
In my previous work I deliberately reconstructed fragmentary moments when a controlled or constrained action happen to the chosen object. It was one way to show the associated mechanisms of our present society driven by the forces of a capitalistic economic system.
The industrial enforced efficiency of post-war design or the machinery of the mass fabricated and designed food production are two of those examples I was associating to in my previous work.
I change aesthetic as I change my subject matter. The aesthetic is always part of the content as it is part of the visual appearance of the artwork.
For example one of my intensive used representation of the object was an aesthetic of exaggerated reality. This representation of the object is relating to the way we are used to see things in super markets and shopping malls. The object has no shadow, no failure is visible. The surface is perfect, colourful and almost unreal. The touch and the sense for the material basis of things are lost and shifting into a virtual appearance. It is more the ideal ‘tomato’ then the real one of this exact moment (see also video ‘falling lettuce’ and object ‘ hold me tied’).