circlesquare
2016

A Play at Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS, Amsterdam

An exhibition by Uta Eisenreich in collaboration with Eva Meyer-Keller and James Langdon

Uta Eisenreich and Eva Meyer-Keller have their respective ways to play with consumer products in their work. As a visual artist Eisenreich uses generic household goods and products to arrange enigmatic still lives, that are nonsenisical or multisensical often playing on semiotics, systems and word puzzles. In turn Eva Meyer Keller as a performance maker is playing with products to abstractly represent the unspeakable: murders, catastrophes and other mayhem.

The new body of work departs from Gertrude Stein’s modernist text Objects Lie on a Table from 1922, which oozes a kindred spirit. As an attempt to make a play on the subject of a still life, objects keep transcending their humble, recognizable forms to shift in and out of characters and situations. Evoking the methods of her cubist circle, the text breaks language and viewpoint apart to form new compositions, bridging the space between the visual, the musical and the verbal.

The exhibition A Play at Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS chooses to bring this textual adventure into the concentrated space of a white cube, in form of a mural conceived in collaboration with graphic designer James Langdon. Unlike the experience of the stage piece -where elements appear in a timeline – the exhibition offers an excess of elements: signs, fragments, props and research material for the viewer to assemble and construct meaning from. A pocket book related to this project is in the making and will be published by Roma publications in April.

At the opening, artist and musician Katrin Hahner will improvise an aleatory sound collage using fragments of the mural as a score. During the exhibition the stage piece ‘Things on a Table’ will be shown twice in full length in Het Veem house for performance. A work in progress presentation of this piece was shown at Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS last year in the performance program. From the press text of ‘Things on a Table’: ‘On a table ordinary everyday objects, paper, milk, ink, an apple, a glass of water, are manipulated into a series of assemblages, cajoled into compositional exactitude, lit and framed by a camera connected to a projector. In front of the audience and the unblinking camera, dreamlike tableaux emerge, the associations of everyday objects start to coalesce questions about art history and the bourgeois obsession with object possession and arrangement.’