Home
Archive
Bookstore
Contact
ANGELA MEWES
When the picture left me it was already too late
and other new works
27 February - 28 March 2009

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

It is just as well reasonable to allegorize one kind of bondage through another, as something really existing through something that doesn’t exist. (Daniel Dafoe)


I kept getting images of new works Angela had been making in the studio since December and each time a jpg landed on my screen it seemed it had been in this zone
into which the old state turns into the new. Her artistic project appears to be centered around the idea of turning sculptures into paintings or paintings into sculptures,
although she works in many different ways that include writing, video and sound. The Daniel Dafoe quote above preceded some notes she sent me and in some ways
describes the manner in which she deals with the dialectic of two and three dimensional space: a play, a substitution, a presence through absence, a restriction that by
its very existence makes escape sweeter. For example, in Invitation of the stranger, 2009 she removed the buckle from a leather belt, inserted a metal rod in its place
and hung it on the wall from one of the already punched holes. This wall work takes on the appearance of painting: a horizontal met by a vertical line against the white
(usually) background. Conversely in paintings such as When the picture left me it was already too late, 2009 a speech bubble is cut on the stretched leather, exposing
what lies behind the picture plane, including ‘real’ space in the painting field-not simply in an attempt to address issues of installation- but rather as a disturbance that
expands the parameters of painting’s own dimensions. Though there are affinities to Steven Parrinos “misshapen paintings” her vocabulary instead of a no wave,
punk- rock inflection is imbued with a minimalist but inherently poetic sensibility.

Her open-ended experimentation with found objects and materials that range from weathered leather, metal, glass containers, belts and suspenders, hanger chiefs,
but also cables, plastics, plexi glass, paint and canvas echoes the  pursuits of the Zero group and their equal interest in works with physical presence as well as in
ephemeral gestures that offered “immateriality” as an alternative logic.

So far, Angela Mewes has been reformulating assumptions made in connection to categories within aesthetics, while also triggering the aesthetic potential of objects.
The exhibition operates as a stage within which these redescriptions can, in the artist’s words: “ set sail, disconnect, show the calm of the trouble”.