Barbara Knezevic. New Work.
by Hilary Murray
The artist goes beyond perceptual states and affective transitions of the lived. It is a question of freeing life wherever it is imprisoned, or tempting it into an uncertain combat.(1)
Barbara Knezevic’s practice displays a natural alacrity with the medium used. It is the simplicity of form that creates its potency; the proposition here is exploration. Although balloons often suggest journeying into the void of the unknown world, they act here as a conduit for internal voyage and the exploration of limits. The mind of artist and viewer alike act as a speculation on the limitless nature of self. When examined in relation to the embodied sculptural objects one becomes aware of the tenous nature of the body. The abrasive jarring of both internal and external worlds is explored in this current body of work. The elasticity of medium is used as a skin-substitue – a boundary of protectant from the exterior. Once strong and reliable, at other times delfated and engulfed by the environs. This maleability and temporality of form associates the mind with the body and we become momentarily aware of both. The tension between this inner controlled world and that which protects one from the external environment is held within the surface of the work. The rubber, stretched to its limit forms a tenous exchange between existance and eradication. It is this space wherein the merging of viewer and work of art creates a momentary tincture between the two; a zone of indetermination.(2)
However precarious the boundary to this world may be the balloon holds its own, evolving over time and changing form. Housed within the recesses of its limitless circumferance is a controlled - false environment, one that breathes, loses energy and reconnects with the tangible. The work disconnects us momentarily from this world and in the space of possibility that exists between viewer and object, proposes a new one. The surface speaks of the eschewing of surfactant, the necessary respiratory element, into the uncannily squeaky-clean surface of the balloon - proposing a type of inhuman. The smoothness of surface charges the viewer like the classically conditioned baby. We shrink from the stretched exterior, encorporating within it our own latent associations. The lack of humanity here fore-stalls ones emotive awareness of the object. This false remove and satisfaction of the enclosed environment proves futile, one is ultimately responsible for ones environment. We exist in the exchange between object and self. The brain is nothing but an interval, a gap between action and reaction.(3)
The exploration of the limitless structure of the self is explored in Knezevic’s current installation. Though often connected to the ground, these objects proffer an uneasy association – the cold solidity of ground and the challenge of existance. The envitable extinuishing of these objects; the ephemeral nature of them, transposes them into dream-like forms. The dream offers the suspension of differends; being at once perception, remembrance and anticipation.(4) The art-making process encapsulated in the struggle between the possible and the impossible, the once imagined, now realised.
Hilary Murray
1. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press
2, 3. Deleuze, Gilles (1983), Cinema 1, Continuum, London
4. Derrida, Jacques (1972), Dissemination, Continuum, London