Ariel Schlesinger at Galerija Gregor Podnar
If beauty can be found in any slight shift in the rhythms of the world, in temporal or functional disruptions, Ariel Schlesinger will be there to capture it – he might even have provoked it himself. His practice creates a tension between the materiality of mass-produced workaday objects, and the function these objects were intended for. The artist introduces a subtle disruption to consumer goods, not by dramatically modifying their external appearance, but rather by “enhancing hidden aspects of their existence”. In renewing how we regard such objects he makes an often trivial reality sublime.
In the sculptures shown here, Ariel Schlesinger applies techniques inspired by the reverse engineering process – by tapping into the process of their creation, he investigates hidden possibilities trapped in devices. The largest of these pieces incorporates an old Mini Cooper. Two large tanks filled with cooking gas are placed in the passenger compartment, and a small flame comes out of a hole drilled in the window.
Born in Jerusalem in 1980, Ariel Schlesinger lives and works in Berlin. As a teenager, he practiced train hopping in California, and developed a taste for the improper use of objects – creatively appropriating established normative conditions. Taking this liberating experience as a starting point, the artist began to seek out other latent opportunities for the subversion of the everyday, by modifying consumer devices or accessing features in them that had been disabled by the manufacturer.
Images and text provided by Galerija Gregor Podnar
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September 27th, 2010 at 11:25 am
I own a new black Mini Cooper –interesting to think of gas flames in relation to my car