152 | 2020

LISA STUCKEY

Sequences Fallen out of Their Time

Karina Nimmerfall’s trace-seeking works take their starting point in the “pseudo-doublet: Realität/Wirklichkeit.”¹ Phenomenologically, writes philosopher Sybille Krämer, a “range of binary configurations” of the trace can be identified, which function according to a “both and as well as” schema between the poles of (i) “Object and Activity,” (ii) “Presence and Absence,” (iii) “Causality and Interpretation,” (iv) “Disturbance and Order,” (v) “Experience and Investigation,” and (vi) “Naturalness and Sociality.”² The starting point of Nimmerfall’s case studies and series is usually an architectural object or structure. To this end, she seeks out the actual locations in order to approach them photographically or cinematically in what is initially a documentary gesture, as well as consulting archives to track down historical material. This is followed by processes of reassembling visual and linguistic set pieces or the simulation of spaces that may not have physical form (any longer), due to having been destroyed, demolished, or never realized in the first place. With the work’s transfer into the exhibition space, closely tied to a publishing practice, the display takes on heightened significance: it is not merely a structure of support, but follows a citational logic with regard to the circumstances under investigation. Evidence-generating materials serve less the purpose of proof than of opening up possibilities for urban transformation processes in geographical and philosophical-topological respects.

Laid out in a way that is relatively open to reception, the discursive reference points of Nimmerfall’s research-intensive works lie, for example, in theories about “Thirdspace” (Edward Soja), for as an artist she is interested not only in a sociological consideration of space, but primarily in the imaginary space. In this realm, the sense of time might strike against the linear reading direction that some grammars prescribe. As a second-order search for traces, this essay examines four of Karina Nimmerfall’s most recent projects in their transmedial artistic-research cosmology from the following conceptual-methodological perspectives: I. Scenario thinking between time and tense, II. Philological-architectural object biography, III. Exhibiting the unhomey, and IV. Drawing a circle for the not yet / anymore.

¹ Jean-François Courtine, “REALITY,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014 [2004]), p. 879.
² Cf. Sybille Krämer, “Immanenz und Transzendenz der Spur: Über das epistemo-
logische Doppelleben der Spur,” in Spur: Spurenlesen als Orientierungstechnik und Wissenskunst, ed. Sybille Krämer, Werner Kogge, Gernot Grube (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), pp. 158–62, trans. HH.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 152/2020, pp. 7–18.

DHYANDRA LAWSON

Janna Ireland Turns Indignities into Triumphs

Racially restrictive covenants prohibited the sale of homes to people of color in white neighborhoods in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Millions of African Americans left the south, and harsh Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation, in search of opportunity in northern and western states. White homeowners responded to this mass movement of people, known as the Great Migration, with discriminatory covenants to keep people of color out of their neighborhoods. Such agreements pervaded suburbs throughout the country, including Los Angeles.

In Breakfast on the Patio (2012), the artist Janna Ireland, who is based in Los Angeles, portrays herself in a suburban home sitting before a decadent meal that resembles a sixteenth-century still life by Floris van Schooten. She is wearing a silk nightgown and a robe. But Ireland does not live here. “I think a sense of alienation has always been part of my experience,” she said.¹

The artist confronts the physical, political, and emotional aspects of home. She often photographs herself and her family in domestic settings, which disrupt distinctions between confession and fiction, documentation and performance. Her work lays bare the complex relationships between people who live together. Building from her experience, she probes wider truths about where people live.

Ireland was born and raised in Philadelphia. At the age of eleven, her family lost their home. Her mother was misdiagnosed with an illness, and after years of wrongful medical treatments—in Ireland’s words—her family fell apart. Displaced and without most of her possessions until she was fourteen, Ireland moved from the house of one family member to the next. In her early series The Spotless Mirror (2011–13), which evolved into Milk and Honey (2018–ongoing), she depicts herself, her husband, and two children living in a California wonderland. Concurrent with these projects, she examined houses and structures designed by the late African American architect Paul Revere Williams. In luminous black-and-white pictures, she revives Williams as one of the most important and under-acknowledged innovators of twentieth-century American architecture.

¹ If not otherwise stated, the quotes by the artist come from conversations with the author in preparation of this article.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 152/2020, pp. 19–30.

CALLUM BEANEY

Incompletion Is Completion: Jerome Ming’s Oobanken

Jerome Ming’s Oobanken (2013–14) consists of a series of photographs showing sculptures and models in various stages of completion. These works vary from a house-like structure on an exhibition display stand to a broken model saw that presumably never made it to the gallery. Initially seeming to show vignettes of the creative process behind experimental sculptures and performances, Ming’s photographs are somewhat reminiscent of the way that some of the conceptual and land artists from the 1970s and 1980s would document their performances and pieces, where the camera was often merely a tool for representing the performance or work behind an installation piece.

“It’s great when you get what the work does, but knowing something of the process, about how the work is made, gives this intimate dimension to it.”¹

Without any explanation from Ming himself, we are invited to peer into this documentation of his creative process, and to see where it took place. In some cases, a lack of explanation or context from the artist can make it difficult to figure out what the work is “about,” what its message to the viewer is meant to be. However, this same ambiguity can also offer the viewer an opportunity to experience a work from multiple standpoints, developing an understanding of them by means of that ambiguity.

Though these vignettes outline both Ming’s environment and his creative exploration of that space, collectively his images can open up a dialogue about the act of creation itself. Before Ming’s camera, both success and failure, final work and experiment, are given equal footing. It offers the chance to see what choices the artist makes—what is given a place in the exhibition, and what kinds of experiments are done along the way.

Photographs, however, carry their own viewing experience, going
beyond an existence as mere records of Ming’s sculptures. Framed up in the camera’s rectangle, Ming has shot with a consistently “square-on” shooting style (and occasionally level horizontally, but angled downward). Additionally, soft tones are maintained throughout Oobanken, giving the work a formal consistency. They feel highly composed, framed up like still lifes of pottery and glassware that artists of old would paint. As composed scenes, the “documentation” in Oobanken starts to come together, and to feel like a work in its own right.

¹ Jerome Ming’s quotes are from discussions with the author between September 23 – October 10, 2020.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 152/2020, pp. 31–42.

RAPHAEL DILLHOF

oceans + ghosts

Jellyfish and dolphin stickers, gaudily iridescent plastic lizards, neon-blue dreamcatchers and transparent plastic seashells: the protagonists in Jenny Schäfer’s visual worlds are objects from the aesthetic peripheries, from the segment of the consumer world alternately referred to as popular culture or plain trash. The multifaceted, multilayered works of the German artist are expeditions into the seemingly boundless stock of toy stores and the shallows of dollar stores and decoration departments, studies into a very specific sphere of life where everything shines, glitters, sparkles, and enthralls.
What qualities make a surface captivating? Which colors arouse desire? What’s there to see in stores where agents of high culture would rarely set foot, even if they are familiar places from childhood memories?

Toys, decorations, testaments to the dazzling world of late capitalism: Schäfer’s artistic practice is to release these things from their contexts, extracting and distancing them from children’s rooms and the worlds of consumption. In her digital and analog collages, Schäfer isolates these things and mounts them against new ones in the style of a stage setting, inserting them into strange intermediate worlds or arranging them in layers. These collages then become the basis of expansive installations, combined with found objects, postcards, posters, toy figurines, or ad materials. The results are atmospheric, associative tableaux filled with mystery, whether Schäfer is addressing the material semantics of fake marble slabs and wood veneer, as in her 2016 book Mystery Hystery, or inserting My Little Pony figurines and unicorns into the series World can only be saved by horses (2019), recently shown at the Jenaer Kunstverein, which refers to the prevalence of horses in the bedrooms of children and adolescents.

Schäfer’s current oceans + ghosts series (2020) follows this same artistic strategy. Her jellyfish, mysterious floating creatures of the deep, are laid over the indefinable landscape of a desert planet. A toy plastic shell hangs over a garishly red ocean, its pearl replacing the romantic sunset. An exuberance of dolphin stickers glitters across the black-and-white background of a calm sea panorama, and a plastic lizard in shimmering blue is mounted on a collage of mountains of toys. In the series, Jenny Schäfer enacts the sea and its ghosts, the fake, lifeless, plastic substitutes that stand in for the endless ocean in our homes, staging them in combination with the real world out there.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 152/2020, pp. 43–54.