Jeanne Silverthorne. The Rose is Obsolete

18.09.2015 - 31.10.2015

Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill, Graz / Österreich

Since the early 1990’s Jeanne Silverthorne has been exploring the image of the studio as a place of ruin and collapse. Excavating this site includes inventorying its physical infrastructure, its processes and its products. Exit with Fan is one such extraction: a rubber copy of studio wiring and signage is coupled with a limp motor and fan to create a tableau of dead-ended exhaustion. Still and Moving features key-hole sized photographs and videos alluding to the haunted architecture of the studio as well as to the materials used there, the artifacts made and destroyed, the aspirations and disappointments and the consumption of energy housed therein.... Some of these videos are original footage, some are found but altered, such as Alphawordless , an edited and soundless clip from Jean Luc Goddard’s landmark film.

In this archaeology of the studio , extinct or ancient genres, such as the floral painting, the still life and the portrait are exhumed as well. They are infected with signs of decay, morbid excess and toxicity, as indicated by the extensive use of phosphorescent pigment and the invasion of rubber insects and weeds. Nature literally forces itself through the cracks of the studio floor in the form of wild grasses and dandelions.

The sculptures presented here are cast rubber, a material inherently de-formalizing– floppy, deliquescent–and in that sense entropic. But rubber has also a humorous aspect, a comic lack of backbone and silliness offsetting morbidity and perhaps reflecting the irrepressibility of the life force, if only at the level of weed and insect.

[Quellle: http://www.zimmermann-kratochwill.com/ ]