Florian and Michael Quistrebert, CHRYS, oil on canvas, 12 cm x 20 cm, 2009
Recently, the artists Michelle Rosenberg, Ralf Ziervogel and the collaborative team Florian and Michael Quistebert gave me the delightful opportunity to check in with them and discuss their work as they near the halfway point of their six month Triangle residency program.
My lively discussion with Michelle reinforced the range of creative possibilities that she is currently exploring. I was earlier introduced to her work in April at Parkers Box Gallery and immediately struck by her imaginative, whistle-board piece made from simple building materials. Minimal but playful, the piece typifies the common elements upon interactivity, participation and community that underlay her various projects. Michelle is using her current studio time to pursue further her sound board projects and to make installation objects from found wood architectural elements that are attached to plastic tubing. The 16” x 16” floor scraps mounted to the wall as well as the meandering sculptural floor piece made from architectural decorative elements speak to her new challenge: how to embed oneself into the physical space through both sound and metaphorical references to built structures. These works-in-progress are being used to resolve issues for larger scale, more public-oriented installations.
After my visit with Michelle, the next engaging half hour was spent with Ralf Ziervogel whose work revolves around exploring the power of visual culture and our increasing reliance upon mass media as a source for defining ourselves. Ralf’s drawings, installations, videos and other mixed media works stem as much from the Minimalist and Conceptual visual tactics of El Lissitsky, Hanne Darboven and Blinky Palermo as from popular culture icons such as Michael Jackson. His recent set of drawings explore the hypnotic effect of underlying systems but mostly the artist’s various projects concentrate upon how we increasingly compare and construct notions of ourselves through highly sexualized and fictitious narratives generated by marketing, fashion, film and other mass media forms of entertainment. Throughout, Ralf is interested in exploding to what he refers as “information bombs” or, as he explains, how communication and technological systems generate clichés of identity.
My last stop was a delightful visit with Michael, one of two brothers of a collaborative team. In contrast to Ziervogel’s outward-looking sensibility, the team turns inward and uses the urban landscape as inspiration to evoke dark, hallucinatory states of mind. The team’s visit to New York from their former residence in Nantes, France has inspired a series of black canvases that make reference to the Gothic architectural elements scattered throughout the city. The canvases are heavily built-up gloss and matte tactile surfaces in which spiral tower designs are deeply embedded. In an earlier series of black ink drawings and watercolor sketches, the team created imaginative dark psychedelic landscapes, empty of humans but filled with allusions to prior cataclysmic events of astrological consequences. Especially effective from this series were those that depicted the remnants of barley visible cities highlighted against a cosmic sky teaming with activity. These works on paper call to mind the late 19th Symbolist work of Odilon Redon and to a lesser extent Alfred Kubin.
I ended my stimulating afternoon noting to myself that each of the three artists, while very different, shared a disciplined visual austerity of execution. But in contrast to their reliance upon minimal means, it was also very clear that all three are abundantly fertile in ideas that reflect upon current societal concerns and challenge conventional cultural notions. It was so exhilarating to see how well they are maximizing their Triangle residency to experiment and explore these issues further.
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