Sofi Żezmer, Remote Control
February 27 – April 3, 2010
Mike Weiss Gallery presents Remote Control, a multimedia installation including sculpture, photography and drawing by artist Sofi Zezmer. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition at Mike Weiss Gallery. Her use of the fragments of manmade, mostly synthetic materials shift the common definition of the objects we use to inform our everyday lives and confront the viewer with his or her own relationship to consumption, mass production and overflow.
With an engineer’s precision, Zezmer constructs her works by a gradual additive process dependent on intuitive responses to the materials and objects she uses forming color- saturated assemblages. Evolving out of a large selection of manmade curiosities, each piece takes on an identity and physical body of its own; some remain self-contained in their form while other spread out along the walls like micro organisms.
Among the abundant elements she incorporates are objects which in their original context were distinctly purposeful such as drinking straws, IV drip tubing, construction netting, film, foil, packing materials, bicycle helmets, cable ties and funnels. In fusing the elements and breaking them down, Zezmer disrupts the common meaning assigned to the items and calls into question our own familiarity with them. Zezmer’s sculptures suggest irrational Duchampian hybrids of mechanical and biological systems. They are embodiments of the complexity of life in the modern age, ruminations on the omnipresence of mass-production, space travel and biotechnology.
Sofi Zezmer structures some of her recent works as interactive sites, inviting simultaneously accessible multiple viewpoints, which provoke conflicting chains of associations. REM LS1, for instance, consists of a mobile, translucent panel attached to the wall with two hinges. The sculpture literally occurs on both sides of the panel as well as in between the two sides. Similarly, the large hanging work Brazil LS1 hovers at the viewer’s eye-level above ground and rotates slowly, disclosing simultaneously numerous vantage points.
Sofi Zezmer lives and works in Germany. Her work has been exhibited in numerous international gallery and museum exhibitions. Most notable were her solo exhibition at Museum Wiesbaden, at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan and her forty two foot long hanging sculpture, Es Darf Kein Mangel Herrschen, commissioned by the NASPA Bank, Wiesbaden, Germany.
