Labor Gruppenausstellung 22.june- 20 August 2011. Katie Armstrong; Birgit Dieker, Stephanie Kiwitt, Ryan Mosley, Luise Schröder. Galerie EIGEN+ART, Au

Labor Gruppenausstellung 22.june- 20 August 2011. Katie Armstrong; Birgit Dieker, Stephanie Kiwitt, Ryan Mosley, Luise Schröder. Galerie EIGEN+ART, Auguststraße 26. Berlin 101117. DE, by craniv boyd.

 

This summer a group exhibition, in central Berlin city, of younger artists who, are still in art academies, of one sort, or another. Merits to be found in a "high street" tier, or trendy, Gallery that still bets on the younger caretakers of the muse. The art made by, the five artists, the art dealers at the Berlin out-post of, Galerie EIGEN+ART, have selected is the major redeeming factor of what is disaster-ridden ground of summer group exhibition at an art gallery.

 

Katie Armstrong, a young American artist, has made an animation, a video sequence, a time based media loop that when displayed on a flat screen, facing an opposite wall with a grid of pencil drawings on index card sized sheets of paper, (A7 or A5) pages small enough to be lifted out of a sketchbook, is a work that looks familiar. The video monitor has one set of headphones for hearing what the sound of the video is, and boy oh, boy does this video need the soundtrack. The delay comes with seeing a pencil drawn, animation that since Pixar and computer generated graphic imaging is delegated to a realm of, and "purposeless" labor intensity. The hand drawn, animations of a lone end of adolescence Caucasian woman, is underscored and enhanced by the sound of slow A-Capella singing of a song eerily familiar. The slow, sensitive, emotive words, sung harmonically, with polyphony, of the same voice, generated in a do it your self recording studio, emerge with time, from a dim familiarity and the over synthesized, Hit me Baby One More Time of Britney Spears, becomes something all together different and more humane in the version of loneliness that is "killing" Katie Armstrong, which accompanies her video, about heart ache. Love, and its many plights are the subject of Britney Spears's bubblegum pop, smash hit song, the indelible mark it left on the hearts and minds of youngsters is palpable in Katie Armstrong's elegy to both Britney, heart ache and the hand made drawing, in service of animation.

 

Birgit Dieker hacks her way, cutting into new heights of sculpture. A delicately framed figure is seated, legs crossed, on a bar stool in the first room of the gallery, the figure has a large beehive style hairstyle, and is covered in ornate gold sequins. The ends of the limbs where hands feet and digits would be are black stumps the back of the figure is slashed open and the decadence of the gold when set against the black carved cloth calls to mind charred remains. Begs the question did they have disco back in the heyday of Pompeii?  Another artwork, by Birgit Dieker, that hangs mobile over the staircase, in the gallery space, is more transparent in the means behind its creation. An ovoid form is cut open and layers of textile, molded around a ball form are peeled back. For a strange hatching experience. 

 

 

Other artistic positions exemplified in the group exhibition titled LABOR, are that of the Meta work, or showing boredom and malaise with current events. Luise Schröder, and her video, of a, German Local Television news crew, on location about to record, is dry fare, as are black and white photographs of: the platforms for consumer culture and the sites for purchasing, quotidian items like climate control apparatuses, dryer still when printed out at roughly three by two yards and on mat ink jet printer paper.  The photographs by Stephanie Kiwitt are understated despite their large format, and in the absence of color and the just so, no set dressing whatsoever of the photo shoot, Stephanie Kiwitt, like her fellow country woman, Luise Schröder, is represented in the exhibition by art that resolutely contends within the cannon of clear-cut artwork fighting not to have the look of art. By craniv boyd.