Photo: Margareta Mayer
Biography
Born in 1987 in Graz, Austria, I grew up in a small town called Lieboch, where I went to elementary school during the week, served as an altar boy on weekends, and felt happy to be part of the fire brigade. Time went by; and everything has changed in-between. Today, I'm living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area, USA.
Art Practice
I go somewhere: it can be a black-sanded beach, a mountaintop covered in snow, an unknown city, a friend’s house; it could be your house, my apartment, their living place; it can literally be everywhere on planet earth. I place a stack of paper on the ground and pour ink on the first sheet of paper on top of the stack. I stay in this place and as I start to adapt, I watch, and listen, carefully sense the place; the poured ink starts to react to the physical and atmospheric conditions of this place as well. The movement of the wind mixes and distributes the ink, the planet's gravity field pulls the particles and molecules toward planet earth's core, chemical and electrostatic reactions take place, maybe a quick interaction with my hand, repositioning the stack just a little bit; the dyes and solved pigments soak through the layers until they stop moving. I sit next to it and wait. Sometimes, I leave, but the paper and the ink stay in place to react with the environment for hours or days. If I leave, I hide the stack. When the fluids have evaporated and the sheets are dried by the sun, I go back to the place and look through every single sheet of paper, to find the image. If there is a tiny fragment that caught my attention, I use macro photography to scale up the visual structures, to bring them closer to my eyes. In a last step, I use dye sublimation to transfer and conserve the image into sheets of aluminum, so I can put it on the wall, hang it from the ceiling, or lean it somewhere in space to look at it and wonder about where it comes from.
I can imagine that my art practice is rooted in my deep admiration for planet earth, the cosmos; everything I know about it and experience in it: the richness in color, form, and materiality; the ongoing processes of change in a system where everything is entangled with everything else throughout all scales. Dynamic, richness, and complexity – all based on beautiful principles.
Upcoming
At this moment, I'm working as a Graduate Fellow at Headlands Center for the Arts. New visual and acoustic work – related to the coastal shoreline and the hills of the Marin Headlands – can be seen and experienced at the Graduate Fellow Exhibition in June 2023.
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Finally, I feel honored to be part of Hung Liu Estate, where I manage the artist's studio in Oakland. She was perhaps the greatest Chinese artist in America, as well as a professor at Mills College. Sadly, Hung Liu passed away in August 2021. Please take a moment and click on the flying rat to see her work:
