Self Absorption at the Fringe of Your Hole

Opening reception: Thursday, February 2. 2012, 19:00.
Introduction: Axel Stockburger
 
Exhibition from February 3 through March 30, 2012.
Open Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m

Thomas K. Lang Gallery at Webster University

Susanne Schuda takes Found Footage from the Internet and photos of herself, working them up into digital collages which are transformed into three-dimensional pictorial objects. The cave as a reference to the Stone Age becomes a symbol of the fundamental organization between the sexes and the environment. Today, any biological primeval programme has to compete with the notion of self-definition in a progressive Anthropocene era and with collective consumption as a safeguard for growth.
 
The website www.unsure.be confirms the individual as well as collective destabilization.
The decades of the economic miracle were a magical, meaningful phase, which along with economic growth brought prosperous comfort and stability to the household. The warmth and protection of expansion even enabled a closer examination of traditional principles of organization. Yet this emotional security is now yielding to the genuine non-binding nature of self-regulating markets, and we have to ask the question, how will today’s societies be able to combine cannibalism, as a futuristic form of conservation of the species, with a traditional concept of democracy?
 
Humor, irony and an involvement with her own persona are central elements of Susanne Schuda’s work. Humor offers the opportunity for a taboo-free, close examination of value systems, and enables the fostering of an ambivalent relationship between utopia and destruction, between insight and imbecility.
 
Susanne Schuda presents new collages, videos, and a website, and makes a lot of serious jokes.