Isabel Schmiga

Au Studio

The works of Isabel Schmiga (*1971, lives and works in Basel and Berlin) are concise eye-catchers with a clear effect of recognition. They stand out by a poetic strength, which results in a peculiar combination of disconnected objects and materials. Isabel Schmigas procedure can be described as a combinatory process, which brings to mind collage. In a, so to speak, scientific method she lays out a conceptual field for her artistic procedure. As a draftswoman and sculptress she mostly amalgamates materials from her immediate every day life. They uncover, moved from her targeted hands, gaps between text and picture. This idiosyncratic game between text and picture is especially evident in the graphical room installation SEAMING: Eyes cut out of magazines equipped with artificial lashes, are put together horizontally at eye level in a line onto the wall. Abstracted from the familiar position of the face, they become a cartographic borderline, which comes together in repetition of singular “letters” (eyes) in a panoramic show to a BLINDtext (DUMMYtext). This borderline, which seems to be on its own move on microscopic lash legs, slide in close sight as a BILDtext (IMAGEtext) in the eye of the observer. The eye itself is motive, but in the sense of a repeating reproduction of the image. Isabel Schmiga works as an independent explorer. She collects data, enables comparisons, builds up genealogies, and so critically questions what is generally accepted as reality. Talking about science in her work does not mean the confirmation of judgement and prognosis, but poetic collisions, realisation and visibility of the abundance of meanings, which lay hidden in the blind spot of our eyes. In ».TEXTGAP.«, her first exhibition in the French-speaking Switzerland, are shown such works as SEAMING, WORKING ON and OBSERVERS. The artist creates a new Installation especially for the space of Le Studio CAN, which changes the coordination of the rooms in the sense of her artistic position: displacement, dissection, concatenation and collision indicate further unknown text gaps.

Opening June 3 2006
Exhibition from June 4 to July 30 2006