Searching for the Shapes Within
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EN Searching for the Shapes Within Grey Crawford | KwieKulik | Teresa Murak |Riitta Päiväläinen | Finnbogi Pétursson | Ragna Róbertsdóttir | Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir | Ryszard Wasko Opening: Friday, 20 November 2020, 12 – 8 pm Exhibition: 21 November 2020 – 27 February 2021 Teresa Murak Sculpture for the Earth, Ubbeboda Sweden, 1974 silver gelatine print 41 x 50 cm The Art World of the 1960-70’s experienced a healthy transformation in perception with the emergence of Performance and Land Art. These new modes of artistic expression challenged the traditional white cube scenario of what art is and how it should be exhibited. Using our natural environment as its own stage for creative interpretations in whatever form, helped in laying the foundations in how art is perceived in this century. Searching for the Shapes Within, is a group exhibition presented by Persons Projects, that focuses on the earth as a common base for these different artistic interventions. What we see, breathe and stand on is part of the natural world we build our state of being from. Yet in reality it’s a combination of numerous elements and shapes all converging together to form an environment that’s in constant flux. What all these artists share in common is a mutual sense for experimentation that creates new frames for thought. Their works form a 50-year timeline, beginning in the early 1970’s up until the present, that engages in a joined dialogue that spans from California, Iceland, Finland, Poland to Israel. They share a collective approach in how they use our natural landscape as the basic material for their frames of thinking. These pieces find their beginnings from the Mojave (California) and Negev (Israel) deserts, onto the glaciers of Iceland, back to the forests of Finland and finally to the rolling hills of Poland. Their bond is not bound by a place, rather a cognitive approach in understanding Lindenstr. 34-35 the aspects of meaning through the process of doing. Their methodologies may D-10969 Berlin differ yet they all share a performance like sensibility in the realization of the final [email protected] +49 30 2888 3370 image. These works represent personal stages without borders, where there is no PERSONSPROJECTS.COM other audience but the future. EN Searching for the Shapes Within Grey Crawford | KwieKulik | Teresa Murak | Riitta Päiväläinen | Finnbogi Pétursson | Ragna Róbertsdóttir | Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir | Ryszard Wasko Opening: Friday, 20 November 2020, 12 – 8 pm Exhibition: 21 November 2020 – 27 February 2021 FINNBOGI PÉTURSSON The best way to describe Finnbogi Pétursson’s process of thinking is to imagine what the center of the earth might sound like. His focus is on silence as a concept for thought and being. He uses his installations and objects as conduits to enhance the observer’s sensibilities to visually and physically experience a state of mind induced by a moment of movement. In his piece Centre he utilizes the mythical story in Jules Verne’s book A Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Here we find Professor Otto Lidenbrock as the tale’s central figure, an eccentric German scientist who believes there are volcanic tubes that reach to the very center of the earth. Along with his nephew Axel and their Icelandic guide Hans they rappel into Iceland’s celebrated inactive volcano Snæfellsjökull, then contend with Centre, 2005, object many dangers, including an underground ocean, cave-ins, subpolar tornadoes, and living prehistoric creatures from the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras. Eventually the three explorers are spewed back to the surface by an active volcano, Stromboli, in southern Italy. Pétursson uses a FM radio transmission alongside a sea washed lava stone which has a microphone inserted within its center mass. This stone was found beneath the Snæfellsjökull Glacier which symbolically represents the entrance to Jules Verne’s book A Journey to the Centre of the Earth. RAGNA RÓBERTSDÓTTIR Her minimalistic roots reach back to the early 1980’s, beginning with the earliest experimentations with organic materials that were inherently common to the Icelandic environment. Róbertsdóttir approaches her work methodically, leaving each element with enough space to define its own presence of being. Her pieces project an overall sensibility that harbors both the power of its materiality combined with the lightness of its becoming – whether it be salt, stone or glass. In an interview for the newspaper Independent she said once, “I always have done it very simply. Often the story is in the Saltscapes, 2020 material.” Her method of working is all about finding the emotional balance between the black lava salt, glass gathering of her materials and absorbing the experience of creating it. Whatever shape, form or material Róbertsdóttir chooses to use for her creations, they all share a similar manner in how she touches and embraces them to pull out their unique qualities. In her Saltscapes Róbertsdóttir’s approach is both meditative and embracing as it reflects her inner self in the same way each individual salt work evolves in its own unique manner to find its final form. Lindenstr. 34-35 D-10969 Berlin [email protected] +49 30 2888 3370 PERSONSPROJECTS.COM GREY CRAWFORD Grey Crawford is an American artist residing in Los Angeles, California. His photographic works from the 1970’s and early 1980’s have recently been discovered and represent some of the first experimentations with manipulating black and white and color photography. During this time period he also simultaneously, explored a series of performance enhanced works connected with Land Art. Grey Crawford’s El Mirage photographic series represents his very unique experimental El Mirage #51, 1978 play through the use of minimalistic special constructions on a dry lake bed in the southern archival pigment print Mojave Desert. His use of glass and steel shaped plates feel more like performance- enhanced sketches that combine the vastness of the chosen site with a hazy horizon that seemingly has no end. These unseen photographs from forty years ago, now arranged together, are more like a contemporary performance. Crawford wanted to expand a dialogue by mixing it up from a conceptual point of view, by manifesting reality through the medium of photography, not the other way around. His was a quest to build new architectural realities. He used his camera to capture these time-sequenced moments. His performances of throwing glass and steel plates into a specified area were meant to manifest his own plane of action, where hard meets sharp, breaking the silence on an infinite desert background. RYSZARD WASKO Ryszard Wasko’s role as an artist cannot be separated from his role as a curator and organizer of some of the most important art events behind the Iron Curtain. As a member of Film Form Studio, Wasko concentrated on the conceptual analysis of the medium: he created videos, photographs, drawings and installations in which time, space, movement and perception were the main subjects. In 1995, Wasko organized the 5th edition of Seven Paths of Roses, 1995, archival Construction in Process, which took place in the Negev desert in Israel. The idea behind pigment print this event was to carry out the work on site, in the context of a given situation – social, political and economic. The main title of that edition was Design in Process, Co-existence. Its purpose was to support the peace process in the Middle East, more specifically, between Palestine and Israel. Wasko states, “The idea of my work came to my mind when I saw a huge natural crater cutting through the Negev desert. This crater was about 1 km deep and was enchanting to me because of its charm and scale. In order not to disturb its ‘pristine’ character, I decided to create a large, simple painting made out of sand and pigments which were left over from past eruptions. The painting was located on a hill inside the crater, with the dimensions of a football field, and pigments were¬ brought from the bottom of the crater. Therefore, the entire process of creating a picture, despite the large number of participating artists, was time-consuming and lasted from dawn to noon. I titled this painting Seven Paths of Roses, because it was a metaphor for the planting of roses in my garden at home. An interesting aspect of this work is that the installation could not be seen in its entirety from the surface of the hill on which it was made. Its overall view could only be captured from the top, above the crater, from a height of approx. 700 meters. My intention was also that this sand painting would be destroyed by the sand storms that often occurred in the desert.” Lindenstr. 34-35 D-10969 Berlin [email protected] +49 30 2888 3370 PERSONSPROJECTS.COM KWIEKULIK KwieKulik was an artistic duo consisting of Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek, who were active in this constellation between 1971 and 1987. Within the frame of this cooperation, they carried out actions and interventions, constructed installations and objects, worked with texts, films, slideshows and mail-art. In December 1971, during an extended discussion between the students of sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, professor Oskar Hansen, and other contributors at the Close-Ups of the Young Creative Workshop in Elblag, a suggestion was put forward by Przemysław Kwiek, to move the discussion from the smoke-filled room into the open Game on Morel’s Hill, 1971, slideshow air, and replace verbal discussion by action collaboration with objects. Oskar Hansen then developed this idea, and introduced strict rules to the planned action (game). The participants divided into two groups: Whites and Blacks choose a hill where Henryk Morel’s sculpture Destruction was located.