…like the wind in the storm like the ocean at dawn as it disappears, with the riptide. What you gonna do with your emotions The ones you barely recognize -Lou Reed, ‘Riptide’, 1996
Riptide brings together objects and images of six artists that trace the gestures of different modes of practice that seek to construct languages through which to relate to knowledge and history in order to understand the world of lived experience and constructed space.
Riptide as a term is incorrect. Whilst its common use designates the phenomena of water streaming quickly out to sea from the water’s edge, it ultimately is a free or speculative signifier. Such a term might more accurately articulate a misunderstanding of the natural world, or an understanding of a world built on fragments of empirical forces, flows or sensations.
Many works of this exhibition operate through recovered or remembered images of surfaces and treatments of public, often civic space. Many of these treatments of material investigate discords or dislodged unity in regards to seriality and rational treatments of organised space. In a number of works Modernism and its legacy appears and is reconfigured. Strategically each of these works offer a ground upon which new notions of subjectivity emerge through the reconstruction of the façade of modernism as an active image.
These works can be understood as objects that position themselves against an imagined image of modernism as a semi-deceased subject; a ongoing active memory that flows through culture, visual production and exchange.
For further information about the exhibition please contact Kerstin Engholm +43 1 585 7337
kerstin engholm galerie schleifmühlgasse 3 a -1040 wien
