12 Prostorov/12 Spaces/12 Räume
Koroška Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Slovenj Gradec, Slovenia
16. 10. 2014 – 26. 11. 2014
Katja Felle (2013 residency*) presents herself at the exhibition with works from the Interference in Communication series that continue the exploration of human perception in the context of mass media and numerous media-transmitted images, which she started already in 2013 at the exhibition in Freising. Katja Felle deals in extreme detail with the presentation of digital disturbances through the medium of painting, as this provides double interference, which appears in the motif itself by means of disintegrated images, and also like disturbances in the transmission of images to the painting medium. Through her paintings, the artist creates a discrepancy between aesthetics which is captured in the painting technique and aesthetics, which is essentially the aesthetics of a perfect image, to which we lose or are unable to establish any relationship exactly because of its perfection. The disturbance as such is understood from two aspects, as one that upsets the order and establishes chaos, as well as one that is constructive, that is the reason for the establishment of a new order. Felle threads disintegrated images onto the canvas and overlays them to the extent that a kind of content can only be sensed. With this, she points out the emptiness of what is transmitted by the media, as well as the emptiness of media images themselves, which lose their consistency in the fight for people’s attention. With the transference of these disturbances and images to the canvas, the artist also highlights the element of time, for she stops the image and devotes attention to exactly that (the disturbance), which the media wish to conceal.
Her colour palette consists of vivid, clear colours, colour contrasts, and we can often find in her works square patterns that remind us of either digital noise, which appears in disturbances in transmissions of a digital signal, or as colour lines, that remind us of an empty screen when the television programme is over.
Andreja Hribernik
* Schafhof – Europäisches Künstlerhaus Oberbayern, Freising, Germany.