Thursday, November 5, 2015

Lara Dahlmann: Currents

Monday 9 November, 2015, from 7 pm, at Alice Yard 


“[Lara Dahlmann’s] notebook studies of the back steps of modest middle-class concrete houses, the occasional Barataria night-scene, or the shape of breadfruit leaves, all visual phenomena that we often ignore, became her own personal visual vocabulary or sensorial mapping. As her responses evolved, she began to have fun, and invented ‘exotic’ hybrid animals and personages taken from the labels of local consumer items or the Murtis of Hindu calendar art, while still engaging and processing the expectations one conjures from old-fashioned geographical annuals…”

— Christopher Cozier, from the catalogue of a piece of pomerac, June 2009, Leopold-Hoesch-Museum and Papiermuseum Düren


Lara Dahlmann is a German artist, living and working in Hamburg. For the past three weeks, she has been artist in residence at Alice Yard. On the evening of Monday 9 November she will present a series of drawings and a mural in an open studio event at Alice Yard.

Earlier stays in Trinidad had a deep impact on Dahlmann’s work and inspired her to create a visual vocabulary of her own mythologies as a constant exchange with the surroundings. These previous visits also suggested the possibility of working with space: her silhouettes began as shifting installations of paper clippings on a wall, were then executed as two-dimensional cut-outs, and have expanded back onto the wall again as a paper installation.

Her current series of larger cut-outs was influenced by a visit to Caroni Swamp, and depicts views of the swamp as a constantly revolving system of creation and destruction. Deriving from this meditation on stillness and transcendence, the works are now about the underlying dynamics, the circulation and the motion.

All are invited.