December 2021 - Artists of the Month

Each month the wendy.network selects three artists within its growing community. The entirety of the month is dedicated to the artists, their work and their passion.

December features: Kristina Feldhammer, Linda Pearl Izan, Marcus Neustetter.

spotlighted –> Kristina Feldhammer

‘What I am interested in is movement – of all and any kind: the movement of the earth, of emotion, of bodies, of interaction, of speech, of texture… And so, it’s also my work that is constantly moving. Somewhere between self-portrait photography, dance and alternative darkroom printing. Most important are the moments where there is a break or a dissolution of the borders between the self and the other – „the other“ including simply everything that isn‘t considered part of oneself: living as well as non-living beings and objects.

It‘s about points of contact, merging points. Between body and everything that isn‘t body; between self-discovery and self-loss; between emergence and decay; between personal and collective; between improvisation and staging. I like the idea of the body as a mirror of all worlds (outer as much as inner) – the body not as an object functioning in society, but as a pulsating, interconnected yet distinct, ever changing life.‘

Pieces:

• (Untitled Collection of Works)
• Emerging
• (Behind the scenes video)

Linda Pearl Izan

An alternative discourse to the official news channels on the Covid Pandemic; one that has presented a febrile platform of misinformation.

Photography LPIzan

The tell-tale signs of plastic waste thrown into the waterways and transported on the ever-moving flow to the open sea, is an unfortunate reality, corrupting our relationship with water.  

Photography © Jonathan Dredge

The installation focuses on cuts in Refuge Funding. Using statistics printed on fabric, wrapped around traffic cones sending out cultural visual links with a police crime scene. The tape and traffic cones sit on printed neoprene with a further message regarding the ubiquitous nature of domestic abuse.  

Photography LPIzan

‘Selecting a limited amount of art to give an overview of my practice was a hard task and the line that I drew was to look at social issues that remain in the headlines as we come to the closing weeks of 2021. Major concerns of the Covid Pandemic, Climate Crises and the continuing societal shame of Domestic Abuse appear to summarise a point in time. Although the work presented employs textiles, I do not define myself as a textile artist, a better definition would be an artist working in mixed media.  The qualities I welcome when working with fabric and thread are malleability, a surface I print on, use of free motion machine embroidery, fold, wrap, unravel and bleach. Fabric responds and allows me a greater creative expression. ‘

Pieces: 

• Snake oil Salesmen and Charlatans
• The Treachery of Pollution
• We Warned You; but you didn’t Listen

Marcus Neustetter

After a decade of attempting to engage the defunct lonely orbiting South African ambassador, Sumbandila Satellite, artist Marcus Neustetter once again seeks collaboration with her and sends a letter via the Moon Gallery. Sumbandila means “lead the way” in the Venda language. The letter asks her to “lead the way again”. Not in the way she was intended to operate when launched in 2009, but in continuing to stimulate the imagination, question the unknown, and speculate new perspectives into space and onto earth. The letter is a zig-zag folded drawing in ink representing a cross-section of an imaginary terrain. An engraved morse-code-message weaved its way through the drawing.

When folded up it measures 1 cubic cm and when expanded it is just under 1cm x 8cm. It is on acrylic plastic.

.-.. . .- -.. – …. . .– .- -.– .- –. .- .. -. (Lead The Way Again)

On Earth, A Letter to SumbandilaSat is accompanied by a series of artwork actions that summarise a long journey by Neustetter of attempting to communicate with the satellite. Short films, large drawings, installations, performances, stamp designs, light artworks, digital print series, rocket sculptures and robots from different parts of Africa, Europe and America are all steps in Neustetters’ search to imagine the speculative perspective of SumbandilaSat.

In 2022 the Moon Gallery will be traveling the letter artwork to the International Space Station and in 2024 to the moon. Currently, an installation reflecting on a decade of dialogue with Submandila Satellite is on exhibition at The Mixed Reality Workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa until 22 January 2022.

Public-studio performance in Vienna resulted in a large-scale painting at Der Kunstsalon im Fluc for the exhibition Properties of a Presence curated by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll.

Marcus Neustetter’s durational performance entitled Tracing Absence in earth and ink. Exploring his own invisible territories, the artist looks to intangible ownership and postulated repatriations, to make sense of his life reframed with his move from South Africa to Austria. In the process, Neustetter traces and maps his search of what is absent. Marks conjure up abstract forms that have changed due to distance and displacement and the composition evokes territories and landscapes permeated by both the forgotten and the unknown.

This work is part of a long trajectory of works investigating storerooms and archives of some of the world’s largest museum collections. From the Smithsonian museums in Washington DC to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, from Johannesburg to Hong Kong to Vienna the artist is on a quest in conversation with the collections custodians, curators and the objects themselves. This is as much a critical consideration in to historical and continued claiming of culture as it is a personal exploration of the unknown. As an artist he is known for his devoted depictions of in-between spaces. His thinking has often been inspired by the work of archaeologists and astronomers and has led to a quest to represent the vertical gaze into past and future that has pulled him between the museum and public space.

photographer: Oliver Hirtenfelder

Pieces: 

• Earthforms
• Lead The Way Again
• Tracing Absence

Want to be showcased as wendy’s next ‘Artist of the Month’? 

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