between places / je näher desto ferner

6. to 20. July 2014

Artists:
Shauna Merriman
Michiko Nakatani
and Yusuke Omuro (Architecture)

Opening hours:
Fri. 16 – 20 h / Sat. Sun. 14 – 20 h

Vernissage:
Sun. July 6, 3 p.m.

Artist talk:
Sat. July 12, 6 p.m.

Finissage:
Sun July 20, 5 pm
with Video Dance Site-Specific Performance Tracce | directed by Stefania Milazzo, Video by Stefania Milazzo & Konrad Behr, Live Music by Max Loeb Garcia
More information and registration contact for the workshop >here< Sponsored by the City of Dresden, Office for Culture and Monument Protection

Shauna Merriman and Michiko Nakatani are based in Columbus, Ohio and Tokyo, Japan respectively. Both artists spent a large part of their artistic careers in Dresden, with work centered in the rooms of geh8 Kunstraum und Ateliers e.V., in which they also actively participated. Nakatani studied sculpture at the HfbK in Dresden and, after a two-year stay in her home country of Tokyo, also completed her master’s degree in Dresden, which she finishes with this exhibition. Merriman was an artist-in-residence fellow in Dresden after studying ceramics in Columbus, and decided to return to the same place a year later to also study as a master student at the HfbK Dresden. She also ends her three-year residency with this exhibition.

The perception of scenic, architectural and cultural characteristics of the places of origin and residence are almost inevitably linked in this global constellation to a wide-ranging examination of the places of living and working. Dresden is the central meeting place and the pivotal point of world-view border crossings. Both artists approach questions of places and non-places, of overcoming physical boundaries and places that exist “only” in the imagination in different ways.

Shauna Merriman
Shauna Merriman

Merriman confronts herself and the viewer with a landscape in which strangeness has a constant presence. She depicts the places of daily (working) life, which she conceives as a nesting of various partial realities, in “topographical” surfaces, in which, by means of shaping and the choice of materials, she makes possible several ways of seeing and interpreting, which differ greatly in extension and middle or immediacy. She interprets the real environment (here: Dresden) in such a way that it approaches Merriman’s personal inner landscape, which in turn enables her to connect herself to other places.

Michiko Nakatani
Michiko Nakatani

Nakatani goes the way of the inner conception of places. A house that she will build in the exhibition hall radically delimits itself from the present place (geh8), but inside does not allow the perception of these boundaries. In this boundless white, the viewer has the possibility to approach different places: In a negative-relief technique that has great significance for Nakatani, motifs become visible that are in part connected to Dresden, but are not an explicit image of the city. The shadowy character of the illustrations distances them from the original motifs and makes them appear as mere impressions that may be seen as unconnected to a particular place. Commonalities of different places of life come to the fore. Through the technique of the negative, she materializes those abodes that we call imagination, desire, dream, or even inner place. The view into one’s own world of experience gains in importance and demands an active attitude of observation from the visitor.

 

Images Konrad Behr (Lizenz: CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)