USA participating artists: Rebecca Partridge

Rebecca Partridge

Crossing Over

In the 80s I grew up with the idea of America as a wonderland; I was lucky enough to visit then and it did feel like ‘crossing over’ to another, more dazzling world… Now I can only think of contradictions, complex crossovers of misaligned cultures and ideas. The poster consists of a cross between two images: Brooklyn Bridge is superimposed on a geometric painting that I made after visiting the Alhambra. It is at once the idea of a glorious expansive America we have been fed on and a hint towards the ideological battleground it has become.

Rebecca Partridge is an artist working in Berlin.                                                   RP 2013

USA participating artists: Vanessa Jackson

Vanessa Jackson

Amerika

The place we never quite get to, only in our imagination from books and films. I have been to NYC more times than I can remember, had a studio and exhibited, lived there for months at a time, fell in love, back in the 80’s, been south as far as Washington DC and up to Boston, even spent a couple of weeks in LA and SanFrancisco. But America I do not know…..and perhaps I am more familiar with Amerika on my mind.

This work was made back then, very curvy, playing with the neo geo of the times, more curves than was allowed in strictly modernism revisited.

Vanessa Jackson lives and works in London and went to St Martins Art School and the Royal College of Art. She has shown extensively as a painter with recent exhibitions in London of wall paintings at Sadler’s Wells Theatre and the Café Gallery, Southwark Park.

www.vanessajackson.co.uk                                                                                               VJ 2013

USA participating artists: Sam Basu

The next in our running series:

usa6VsmallISO Mirror, 2013

Shows a stitched together image of a mirror distributed over eight A4 sheets and joined together to make up an A1 image. The image makes reference to the mirror in the German fairy-tail Sleeping Beauty, known to most through the Walt Disney version of 1937. ISO 216 is the international paper standard introduced in Germany in 1922. It uses a mathematical aspect ratio to define the relationship between its various sizes. America does not prescribe to this system.

Sam Basu is artist and co-founder of Treignac Projet, a collective research project in France.

SB 2013

USA participating artists: Maria Thurn und Taxis

 

During the USA exhibition, GIG Munich will be posting short individual features on all participating artists. This is the first of the series:

usa4Vsmall

I have always been drawn to American popular culture, specifically to the movies from the 70s, which I watched when growing up in the 80s. Looking back, I find the film Star Wars particularly relevant to my current practice.

The epic struggle between good and evil in Star Wars is a very prominent one and very American in its simplification of moral values. The “good guys” are clearly contrasted with the “bad guys”. This moral branding is a theme throughout the film, ominous music appearing when the Empire is on screen and changing into something lighter and more hopeful with the appearance of the Republic. Darth Vader represents darkness right down to his black uniform as opposed to Luke and Lea’s almost monastic white.

For this show, I wanted to create a Darth Vader logo. Against a plain red background, I coupled the image of his helmet with some flowers, a hippie gesture, which belongs to the troubled American civil rights movement originating in the 60s, but already on the wane by the time the Star Wars films were being made.

MTT 2013

 

Save the date (auf Deutsch!)

usafont

Von Anbeginn an übte Amerika einen starken mythischen Reiz auf die Welt aus. Amerika ist sowohl ein Ort als auch aus eine aufregende, wirbelnde Abstraktion von Ideen, Fantasien, Träumen und Bildern des Imaginären, das nicht nur Amerika gehört sondern der ganzen Welt. Unser Amerika (wir, die keine Amerikaner sind) beschwört heftige, parteiische Emotionen herauf, und macht unsere Beziehung zu unseren Verhältnisse und zu der Realität der USA deutlich. Ein solches Amerika, das Amerika der Welt, war und ist ein Stoff und eine treibende Kraft kulturellen Schaffens.                                    Alasdair Duncan

Die von GiG Munich organisierte Ausstellung, U-S-A,  erweitert die Thematik der Amerika-Kuratoren. Die Ausstellung hat vor, unsere europäischen Vorstellungen Amerikas zu sammeln und unsere Beziehung zu der aktuellen Realität der USA widerzuspiegeln.

GiG Munich lädt Künstler, Designer, Architekten, Fotografen und Filmmacher ein, Plakate ihrer Vorstellungen von Amerika einzureichen. Während des München-Kunst-Wochenendes 2013 werden diese Plakate gezeigt und dann in die Amerika-Ausstellung aufgenommen.

Save the date!

GiG Munich is planning a group show to coincide with the annual München Kunstwochenende taking place on the  8th, 9th and 10th of November. Save the date!

usafont

America has from its inception had a powerful mythic pull for the world beyond it. America, as well as being a place, is made of a heady, swirling abstraction of ideas, fantasies, dreams, myths, and images: forms of the imaginary which belong no less to the world than to Americans. Our America (we who are not Americans) invokes fierce partisan emotions, and draws us here and there in our relation to our own circumstances as well as the reality of the United States, better and worse. This America, the America of the rest of the world, has been, and continues to be, a material and drive for tremendous cultural production.

Alasdair Duncan, Amerika

 U-S-A, organized by GiG Munich, continues with the premise put forward by the curators of Amerika. The show aims to collect our European visions of America and reflect the mediated relation we have with the current realities of the United States.

GiG Munich invites artists, designers, architects, photographers and filmmakers to submit posters documenting their American visions. These 20 posters will be shown as part of Munich’s Art Weekend 2013 and then incorporated into the larger Amerika show.