...drawling, stretching and fainting in coils...
Edited by Diana Thater. Texts by Kent Nagano, Bernhart Schwenk, and Diana Thater
This catalogue documents the group exhibition, curated by Diana Thater, that accompanied the 2007 Munich Opera Festival. Loosely based on the festival’s premier opera, Alice in Wonderland, the citywide exhibition featured new works by Leo Estevez, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, T. Kelly Mason, Katy Schimert, Jill Spector, Dawson Weber, and Thater. These works were installed at various points throughout the city so that the exhibition embodied Alice’s wandering narrative. In this smart and charming catalogue, each artist discusses his or her own works, ideas, and methods of production. Kent Nagano, Music Director of the Bavarian State Opera House, and Bernhart Schwenk, curator of Munich’s Museum of Modern Art, introduce the project and the artists. Thater concludes with a brief statement about the exhibition. Artist Dawson Weber designed the book as part of his contribution to the exhibition.
Publisher: Bayersiche Staatsoper / Pinakothek der Moderne
Artists: Diana Thater, Katy Schimert
Contributors: Kent Nagano, Bernhart Schwenk, Diana Thater
Publication Date: 2008
Binding: Softcover
Dimensions: 8 1/2 x 9 in (21.6 x 22.9 cm)
Pages: 96
Reproductions: 100 color
ISBN: 9781605851914
Retail: $25 US & Canada | £16 | €20
Status: Available
Diana Thater
Since the early 1990s, Diana Thater has created pioneering film, video, and installation-based works. Her primary emphasis is on the tension between the natural environment and mediated reality, and by extension, between tamed and wild, and science and magic. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including literature, animal behavior, mathematics, chess, and sociology, her evocative and sometimes near-abstract works interact with their surroundings to create an intricate relationship between time-based and spatial dimensions. She frequently transforms the exhibition venue into a hybrid space between sculpture and architecture, using color and light alongside her installations.
Katy Schimert
Working across a variety of media, including drawing, sculpture, and film, Katy Schimert uses fragments of personal experience as her conceptual impetus; the intersection of the fine and decorative arts is a formal point of departure for the artist. Densely layered and vaguely topographical, her drawings suggest sequences of cosmic or otherworldly events populated by ethereal human figures. In her intricate three-dimensional works, human and familiar forms serve as physical containers for encoded thoughts and symbols. Schimert’s dynamic surfaces, which continue to unfold after prolonged viewing, are essentially volumetric drawings (she often draws and paints on the exteriors of the forms). Fully manipulating and reinventing each surface, she creates what she describes as “space for illusion.” The results of this investigation are not only visually compelling, but formally succinct – this allows her works in various media to meld together as many pieces of a broad, ongoing visual essay.