NYAB Event - Holly Zausner "A Small Criminal Enterprise"

Holly Zausner "A Small Criminal Enterprise"

Postmasters Gallery

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For this one-person show Holly Zausner transforms her 16mm film Unseen, made for the Bode-Museum in Germany, into a series of photo based collages. These multi-scale works foreground her ongoing interest in film and its relationship to various media.

The movie's eponymous opening sequence features a skywriting plane above the city of Berlin. The word Unseen appears, each letter written as the one before it disappears, in a thread of erasure that develops and fragments as the handmade photographic works emerge from various scenes in the film. Single frames become building blocks - an equivalent of a painter's palette - for Zausner to construct her photographic grids.

The window of the artist's gallery explodes onto the street as she passes. She continues through notable Berlin locations in search of a space of rest for two unwieldy sculptures; one male and one female. As Zausner and her rubbery protagonists move through the landscapes, they encounter sites both central and peripheral to the city's life; a bread factory and a newspaper plant, as well as a defunct amusement park in the former East. Airports, trains stations, and large avenues are empty of people, and tigers patrol the sculpture garden of the Neue Nationalgalerie. Baroque statues in the Bode-Museum eye Zausner and her companions as they move through the galleries.

The dialogues between the architectural and corporeal generate the interstitial and often abstract moments of the collage work. With obsessive repetition Zausner re-samples the content and redefines its structure. These two-dimensional pieces offer a new exploration of filmmaking, and a holistic sense of "the sequence". Like a motion picture itself, they are comprised of thousands of frames, now with the opportunity of a macroscopic and rhythmic view of their potential relationships; we step back to have an overview, while maintaining possibility to capture the details.

In Josiah McElheny's text from Bomb Magazine (#105, 2008) he describes Zausner's collage work as "a pastiche of her memories of passing through the world- as we all do- with two selves: her own and her double. The mind, imagining it is alone, constantly rediscovers its companion, the body."

Holly Zausner has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the United States including solo exhibitions at the Neu Nationalgalerie and the Bode-Museum, WÃ¼rttembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany, and Sculpture Center, NY. She has been a recipient the DAAD grant in Germany and a NYFA and New York fellowship. She has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Loock Galerie in Berlin for 2013. She resides in New York, NY and Berlin, Germany.