ARTIST STATEMENT/ABOUT THE WORK
zwischenzeit is a german word and can stand for in the meantime/meanwhile. I played with the terms and thought of a gap in time and space. Because museum have that kind of aura for me. It is a series of works which are titled that way. All are showing people being in temple-like museums, togehter with great pieces of art (F.Kline).ARTIST STATEMENT
ABOUT THE WORK
Elisabeth Schmirl is part of a generation, which has grown up with the conditions of digital age. Using digital media is a natural part in her life. Similarly in her artwork she regards Post-Modern and Post-Feminism theories of the past as a natural basis. Elisabeth Schmirl refers to this background and deepens the contents in a personal way of observation. Post-Modern ambiguity and a sense for reflection of behaviour and roles are significant for her work. Without being dogmatic or overemphasising, Elisabeth shows in her artwork her attitude towards portrait, public and privacy, body awareness and psyche, past and presence.
my personal watch-list
"I am interested in recreating spare by-products of the media image-machinery and changing their setting into anticipated scenarios of visual communication.
My work reflects on the flow of / lack of communication revealed in images, and their rules of legibility. I am interested in social habits, mechanism and relations manifesting in mass communication media.
I am interested in guessing the individuality of human beings, only by using the fragmental, rudimentary information, given about themselves in the web. I take visual-material and lay open discontinuities in communication spaces. To emphasise the space between sender and receptor, I change their medium by drawing/painting. They become a stand-alone. I reorder them in categories, inter-link them, group them together, to make them stand-together as meta-indications of my researches. My work is spatial, autonomic and multi-partial and forms a shaped, deliberate vis-à-vis. My work explores the interrelationship between my assumptions and suggestions of society and myself embedded in it."
"It seems to be very important, not to neglect the transverbal dimension of communication and to consider the visual, three dimensional or iconic significants , which are much more appropriate for game, invention and for interpretation than the verbal thought, that can have an suppressing intellectual weight." (Julia Kristeva, in FlashArt Magazine 1986)
DESCRIPTION
My urban life is the context, the melting pot, the material generator for my work. I gather visual information bearing reference to, and limited by, my personal notice. Some images I find surfing in the web, others are old photographs, left memories, unspectacular paper or magazine clippings, strange ideas, all day visuals, accidental shots.
I gather and sort them, rearrange and tag them for my use. What forms are emergent clusters, bearing my personal watch-list of interest. I store them as constructed visual question- or theme-clouds, which modify, enlarge, change continuously. This filtered collections I use as footage for my work.
I take new prints from the photos, modify them digitally, cut and paste them, collage them, construct them to together, or take them as they are. In the end I have an ephemeral arrangement of visuals that I want to give a name to, to comment, to recreate, to modify further.
Then I experiment and decide for a fitting ground, form and appearance, to match or outweigh my ideas. The materials and forms are project specific, self-designed and vary from wood, molino, padded grounds over paper, to raw bisque-fired ceramic plates, wedding silk or hand-glued paperforms...
The techniques I work with naturally influence the size of the singular works. Oil paintings could appear to be slightly undersized, drawings could be realized in a bigger format and thus constructing a touch of speciality around the motives they lacked before. But still preserving their immediacy. The final size of a project has to do with the number of works it consists of, and the spatial form it should be presented in. The single work, is an extractable stand alone which reflects the intention of the whole. The resulting final aspect of the pieces can not be exactly specified in advance, since it is always a site and project specific process.
www.schmirl.org