ARTISTS
Kristina Matousch: Stain
A line of trees bordering a street in Brooklyn has been individually framed in plywood, and then clothed in bright orange plastic mesh. The trees are thus transformed into ubiquitous signs of construction, of the city as it gentrifies. This is no longer a place to walk. This is a place where you cannot touch the trees. Your dog cannot read the passage of friends and rivals in traces of piss on exposed roots. This space is being used for something else, a machine process to re-design the urban environment.
Kristina Matousch carries a thin plate metal square into this landscape of protective material. She slips it behind the mesh and then sprays blue paint across her juxtaposition. When withdrawn, the metal plate is stenciled into a negative relief of mesh patterning. The plate is also study of what could not be touched with paint in public, or semi-public, space. It marks some limit to understanding both the city and the body鈥檚 relationship to it.
A stain is foreign to whatever surface it appears on. It is a mark illegitimately placed. It is the trace of some meeting between substances that should have been kept far enough apart that they could leave no evidence of their relationship. Matousch鈥檚 spray-painting stains both the metal plate she brings with her into the street and the site of her painting. There is a third level of staining at work here as well: the paint is fragile. It scratches when Matousch moves the plate after marking it. Dirt and debris cling to it from the street and becomes imbedded in the surface. The street imposes itself on any collision Matousch鈥檚 paintings perform.
Matousch pictures something philosopher Henri Lefebvre also articulates: it is not possible to make pictures of the city as a deep thing, a logic, a unit of space-time, without simultaneously making a picture of the body. This second kind of picture requires a profoundly physical process. It is to this process that Matousch鈥檚 work attends.
A line of trees bordering a street in Brooklyn has been individually framed in plywood, and then clothed in bright orange plastic mesh. The trees are thus transformed into ubiquitous signs of construction, of the city as it gentrifies. This is no longer a place to walk. This is a place where you cannot touch the trees. Your dog cannot read the passage of friends and rivals in traces of piss on exposed roots. This space is being used for something else, a machine process to re-design the urban environment.
Kristina Matousch carries a thin plate metal square into this landscape of protective material. She slips it behind the mesh and then sprays blue paint across her juxtaposition. When withdrawn, the metal plate is stenciled into a negative relief of mesh patterning. The plate is also study of what could not be touched with paint in public, or semi-public, space. It marks some limit to understanding both the city and the body鈥檚 relationship to it.
A stain is foreign to whatever surface it appears on. It is a mark illegitimately placed. It is the trace of some meeting between substances that should have been kept far enough apart that they could leave no evidence of their relationship. Matousch鈥檚 spray-painting stains both the metal plate she brings with her into the street and the site of her painting. There is a third level of staining at work here as well: the paint is fragile. It scratches when Matousch moves the plate after marking it. Dirt and debris cling to it from the street and becomes imbedded in the surface. The street imposes itself on any collision Matousch鈥檚 paintings perform.
Matousch pictures something philosopher Henri Lefebvre also articulates: it is not possible to make pictures of the city as a deep thing, a logic, a unit of space-time, without simultaneously making a picture of the body. This second kind of picture requires a profoundly physical process. It is to this process that Matousch鈥檚 work attends.
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