Berlin Collective Artist Holly Zausner Who Lives Between Berlin & NYC: Upcoming Exhibition

EXHIBITION DATES

November 4 - 26, 2011

OPENING RECEPTION:
November 4, 5 - 9PM

UNSEEN

Holly Zausner’s work is about transformation through mediums both literal and metaphorical. For this body of work, she has transformed Unseen a super 16 mm film made in 2007, which was shown at the Bode Museum, into a series of black, white, and colored collages.

In the film Unseen, the artist searches through key locations and museums in the city of Berlin attempting to find metaphorical space and literal rest for two rubber sculptures, one female and one male. As Zausner and her two rubbery protagonists move through the city, a non-linear narrative unfolds. They encounter sites central to the life of the city, like a bread factory and a newspaper plant, as well as historical sites, like a defunct amusement park in the former East. In the beginning of the film, a skywriting plane spells out the word unseen about the city and the window of the artist’s gallery explodes onto the street. Airports, train stations, and large avenues are curiously empty of people, two real tigers patrol through the sculpture garden of the Neue Nationalgalerie, and the carved baroque saint statues in Berlin’s Bode-Museum seem to eye Zausner and her two companions as they move through thegalleries. Evocative dialogues result between urban environment and art, body, and production, instinct and will, while a strong sense of displacement and unrest alternates with a sense of understanding and acceptance.

Zausner’s fascination with the imagery from the film compelled her to reexamine the content and the structure of the different scenes through collage. She re-edits the film and redefines the structure, which enables a new way of looking at the source material. Using repetition and reconfiguration, the collages are a different way of exploring the act of filming, editing, and making the sound, which are all components that create the foundation and meaning of the collages.

Each collage consists of 1,824 images taken from the film that are 13/16 x 15/16 inches and mounted on 40 x 60 inch museum boards. Each image is hand cut and adhered to the board with double foam stick tape, emphasizing the handmade quality of the pieces and increasing their visual energy.

With each collage, Zausner recreates another version of an individual scene from the film through variations of color and black and white images. The complexity of the details create an abstraction when looking at the work from a distance, while up close the figurative or abstract images create rhythmic patterns which depict individual moments in the film. With her collages, Zausner allows us to step back and have an overview, while at the same time, makes it possible to capture the details.

For additional information on this exhibition, please call the UT Downtown Gallery at 865.673.0802 or visit us online at http://web.utk.edu/~downtown

UTDowntown Gallery - 106 S. Gay Street., Knoxville, TN 3790T.
ph: 865.673.0802 - email: mberry8@utk.edu - web: http://web.utk.edu/~downtown

The University of Tennessee School of Art

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Sarah McFalls
The Ewing Gallery
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
865.974.3200