ON THE WINDOW SILL OVERLOOKING THE BINS
Starting June 11, 2023
Event for invites: Sunday the 11th of June from 16:00-19:00, 2023
Emily Stevenhagen is a Netherlands based multi-disciplinary artist and researcher
‘I create multimedia installations that combine writing, painting, performance and film-making, with figurative painting at their core. Through immersive ‘painted worlds’, my work explores how we emotionally process our past, memories and loss. My practice questions what form the past takes in the present and in what way we perceive our world through memory. What is it to re-represent a memory when a memory itself is the re-representation of experience? How can we understand ourselves and our relationships better through our connection with things and representations that remain? How would it be to exist in this space of re-representation, or do we already? Are we always caught in this liminality?’
‘I am a Netherlands based multi-disciplinary artist and researcher.I create large scale multi-media ‘happenings’ that combine figurative painting with performance. These ‘happenings’ explore, through the context of a ‘painted world’, how we emotionally process our pasts, memories, and losses. Costumes, props and sets I create are all constructed of canvas and paint, and the works sometimes become films, presented in an installation format.I am concerned with social systems and group interactions, particularly dynamics that transgress the boundaries of the human, the object, and the representation. I use memories and my relationships with friendship circles as the backbone of my research, combined with concepts of anthropological theory, psychology, ethnography, feminist theory and literature, to explore the fine lines between harmony and friction, intimacy and violence in our group dynamics and our memories. My work questions what it is to re-represent a memory, when a memory itself is the re-representation of an experience. How can we understand ourselves and our relationships better through our connection with things and representations? Through memories and mis-memory. What is it to forget? In the context of the ‘painted world’ I create, abstraction and 2 dimensionality, becoming 3 dimensionality, enhances the absurdity of the narratives and social relations my work is concerned with. I question what role representation and ‘psychoanalytic projection’ have in our understanding of experiences, and how a painting can ‘come alive’ to re-represent the past.’
