↳ Exhibitions

Pointland at Galerie Conradi

September 21, 2018

Artists: Katja Aufleger, Suse Bauer, Pia Ferm, Lindsay Lawson

Exhibition title: Pointland

Venue: Galerie Conradi, Hamburg, Germany

Date: September 7 – October 27, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galerie Conradi, Hamburg/Brussels

In “Flatland,” Edwin A. Abbott penned a caustic satire on the social hierarchies and mores of Victorian society. One climactic episode describes the protagonist A. Square’s encounter with a point, who leads an absolutely monadic existence in the fathomless depth of zero dimensions and recognizes no existence other than his own. With reference to Abbott’s novella, the exhibition “Pointland” at Galerie Conradi counters the evident reality of the existing world with spaces of possibility. The four artists Suse Bauer, Lindsay Lawson, Katja Aufleger, and Pia Ferm examine the gap between the actual and the possible in a series of interventions into the field of perception.

Suse Bauer’s large-format four-part picture is titled “Landschaft unter Aufsicht” (“Landscape under Surveillance”) and engages in a play with the representation of dimensionality. The work is based on an abstract clay model that a scanner’s light sensors recorded dot by dot. Bauer translates the relief-like forms into two dimensions; drastically magnified in the print measuring 9.8 by 6.6 feet, they limn the fiction of a vaguely dystopian landscape. The work contrasts the characteristics of image and sculpture, plastic processes and digital technology, and raw material and glossy surfaces in order to point up the potentiality implicit in all that is given and the possibility of latency.

Where Bauer explores utopian visions, Lindsay Lawson’s video “The Smiling Rock” studies the production of desire: the heroine, Sophie, falls in love with an agate geode offered for sale on eBay. The veins on its cut and polished face evoke a face with a clownish grin. Her increasingly irrepressible desire for the virtual object—she cannot afford to buy it—becomes the crux of her reality. Mixing animated elements with camera footage, Lawson’s narrative is based on a real-world anecdote: the rock was offered online for a million dollars. By spotlighting the power of attraction an object can exert, Lawson also raises the question of how social values and significances come into existence.

Katja Aufleger’s installation “And he tipped gallons of black in my favorite blue” similarly reflects on processes in which attributions and functions are displaced. She removed the labels from the original packaging of off-the-shelf detergents and arranges the containers in a color circle based on the one Goethe drew up in order to add the perceptual component to physical questions of color design. By implementing her color circle with cleaning agents, she establishes a situation defined by ambiguity: her work points to processes of visualization as well as the removal of all traces.

Pia Ferm’s works, meanwhile, undercut the boundaries of medium specificity. Her tufted wall hangings (“Still life no. 2”, “Baldino”, “Half-profile”) are based on watercolors she manually translates into three-dimensional woolen surfaces. Balancing between painting and sculpture, Ferm’s rugs integrate elements of the visual vocabulary of abstraction, referring to the role of the gestural line in painting while possessing depth as well as tactile qualities. What the four artists’ works approach from various angles is a shared concern: the possibilities opened up by reframing social determinations. They summon us to challenge ideas about the dimensions of the world by demonstrating that what is is not everything.

–Nadine Droste