Ravne Gallery, Ravne na Koroškem, Slovenia

4. 12. 2015 – 15. 1. 2016

Distortion. A deviation from the primary (manageable) state that is in the technological world manifested as a temporary disturbance, an error in the system or even as its permanent change. In the digital language this means the revelation of a medium which is supposed to stay transparent to the point of a utopian non-existence. A construct, adjusted for everyday undisturbed use collapses, the feelings of horror vacui and the sublime appear, but the moment is transient, the disturbances are eliminated, the errors are repaired, the system and devices replaceable. Katja Felle tries to record her own experience of technological fallibility on her canvases, which compared to the original medium promises a longer permanence. With this she prevents the furthering of belief in the perfect instance of technology as a new Holy Grail.

Visible. People perceive reality firstly and above all through the visual and it is not a coincidence that the digital language of the new media too has been translated in a graphically aesthetic form that is comprehensible and easy on the eye. The artist shows it as what it really is – a virtual reality trying to convince us that through it we can live a faster and more informed life. We actually can, in fact, transmit our lives in a new sphere or with the help of social networks even create surrogate lives and pantomimic bodies with which we can live. The discrepancy between the two, which is often a consequence of such transmission, can cause a traumatic experience of one’s self. The disturbances also arise when the same issues are being transferred to the painting medium. Namely, the characteristics of painting materials demand specific grips and by that produce effects that are very different from the technological ones. The artist is not hiding them; on the contrary – she is additionally emphasising them. The painting is dripping, leaking, running, the lines are occasionally interrupted, we can see the strokes of a brush. The work of Katja Felle is – if we are only attentive enough – reminding us that we are still remaining in a physical and not virtual world.

Simulation. Katja Felle’s art pieces are foremost simulations of the technological and its fallibility. They are the appropriation of what contemporary humans encounter, but in a way the artist’s own memorandum of her excursus from the real into the virtual and vice versa. They are the creation of disturbances where before there were none. They are opening the field for discourse where it was interrupted. Silenced.

Sound. And exactly the discourse or the dialog is the field most connected with the verbal and is the association to the auditive area. As the second most important sense it opens a more genuine sensory experience, which the new technology grasps completely, and in the form of noise it intentionally or unintentionally also includes it in its working. Click, beep, siren, row and bustle are only a few of the most representative sounds connected to the notifications or warnings, for which the artist anticipates that will by the visual experience of her works with the help of association be awaken from the unconscious.

Tina Kralj