Inchworm

The words in this sentence are stuck to your screen. Picture a seagull in your mind. That image is stuck inside you. You can eat these words by writing them down, crumbling up the paper and putting it into your mouth, but you can’t eat the meaning. You can’t eat an image either, but they are there, pinging between surface and recognition. When does the surface stop and the image begin? Inchworm, our third exhibition in Lucerne, explores these notions across a series of multimedia works. In a duo of screen printed textile pieces, familiar forms hover just underneath the surface, creating uncanny relationships with colorful sculptures protruding from the picture plane. A small-scale diptych of casting experiment straddles the line between image and matrix. Two un-stretched canvas painting/print hybrids play with the tension of reproduction and an “original” mark. However, the exhibition is anchored by a large multi-panel painting. Using a grid of thirty five foldable boards as a substrate, the practicality of international travel (the pieces fit into a single small suitcase) creates a geometric and dimensional field for intuitive mark making to coalesce into a super structural image. This exhibition was part of A Race in Space, an artist-run improvised music and visual art festival dedicated to the ongoing exchange between Chicago and Lucerne. Spearheaded by Christoph Erb and Sabina Oehninger, the festival crystalized a long standing exchange made possible by generous contributions from the city of Lucerne and individual artists alike. In addition to the the exhibition, we had the great pleasure of creating the festival graphics for A Race in Space. The graphics created a synergic presence across the city of Lucerne thanks to large format “Weltformat” posters screen printed by painter and graphic artist Reto Leuthold. The gallery space was also utilized as a festival venue, featuring solo concerts from Frantz Loriot (CH) and Fred Lonberg-Holm (USA), as well as a performance from Serve Light Make Sound, our on-going audio/visual project with the Zürich-based designer and musician Ronny Hunger.