14/11/2006
Pamela Rosenkranz
Store, London
Test. The artist makes works that resemble the fragments of an untranslatable language. It is a language composed from motifs that occur repetitively but with slight variations - and it is in those small differences that we find clues as to where meaning might lie. 'Resistance' is a slide installation of 81 images of a blackboard in a classroom.
Test
“Our brains, after all, are always at work on some quivers of self-organisation, however faint, and it is from this that an order arises, in places beautiful and comforting, though more cruel, too, than the previous state of ignorance. How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?"
W.G. Sebald 'After Nature', 1988
Pamela Rosenkranz makes works that resemble the fragments of an untranslatable language. It is a language composed from motifs that occur repetitively but with slight variations - and it is in those small differences that we find clues as to where meaning might lie. And yet, like musical variations, the more they occur, the less hope there is of recovering some sort of original meaning. The motifs are often sometimes deliberately simple - an ink drop or the marking of an aspirin pill. They do not gesture beyond what they are, but instead they are the building blocks for a poetry of visual tonality.
Rosenkranz’s works offer us the promise of meaning through the suggestion of narrative, which arises often in the use of time-based media that hint at beginnings, middles and ends. 'Resistance' is a slide installation of eighty-one images of a blackboard in a classroom. The sequence begins with a single dot and then progresses through scrawls that variously resemble mathematical formulae, the doodles of an absent-minded professor and surrealist automatic writing, before ending with a final image of the single dot again. The viewer’s search for meaning is never satisfied. Instead the work, like much of Rosenkranz’s oeuvre, might be understood through the idea of apophenia, a medical condition where people search for meaning in motifs that are not actually present. A state which to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, is where signs are taken for wonders.
Pamela Rosenkranz was born in 1979 in Bern. She is currently on a Swiss Institute residency in New York and previously lived and worked in Zurich. She was recently nominated for the Swiss Art Awards at Basel, and has collaborated with Pavel Buchler on a work in his show at the Kunsthalle Bern. This is her first solo exhibition in London.
Store
92 Hoxton Street - London