MADELINE STILLWELL

February 6 – March 6, 2010

Vernissage: February 6th from 19h (7pm)
Featuring a performance by the artist at 20h (8pm)

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WILDE Gallery is pleased to announce Madeline Stillwell's first solo show with the gallery, opening Saturday, February 6th at 7pm and featuring a performance by the artist at 8pm.

Over the past several weeks, Stillwell has salvaged a wealth of debris from the gallery's vicinity, creating varied installations that serve as stages for her new series of performances. This current body of work continues the artist's exploration of both the literal and metaphoric limitations wrought by excessive and abrasive materiality.

Madeline Stillwell becomes a living extension of her precarious, often physically threatening environments, which bear witness to the artist's investigations into the aesthetics of transfiguration. Shards of broken mirrors, discarded electrical equipment, defunct lighting fixtures and splintering wooden beams are examples of the varied elements that comprise her post-industrial altars.

Her body's negotiations of hidden and perilous conduits across these jagged planes attest to ephemeral states within the urban sphere, while alluding to broader interpretations of endurance, persistence and survival predicated by the unexpected hardships and crises that punctuate our lives and can serve to threaten our very existence. The contemporary mythologies manifested in Stillwell's pieces, as she places herself within the urban landscape's broken artifacts, serve as dramatic reminders of the beauty that lingers in even the most primitive or potentially harmful of spaces, whether literal wastelands of fallen monuments or merely fabrications of our own collective consciousness.

Madeline Stillwell, SIREN SESSIONS 2 2008, Video-still

Exhibited photographs and videos documenting these on-site performances, as well as previous studio-based actions, frame the poetic balance between conflicting extremes that Stillwell conjures in her performances: structured formalism and organic motion, immobility and transcendence, aggression and tenderness.

Stillwell's confrontations with her constructed environments subject her to extensive physical duress. As she navigates her stage, at times completely submerged by the wreckage she inhabits, Stillwell's flesh bears unwitting signs of anguish, but her expression remains one of stoic meditation and silent acceptance, belying the torment her body endures.

While each of the photographs on view capture moments of beauty, coaxed forth from the rubble by the artist's unwavering grace, the exhibited videos expose Stillwell's determined pathology of submission, negotiation and eventual triumph over hazardous conditions. It is the live performance, however, that most viscerally transmits the adrenaline of each intuitive movement, in which the acceptance of pain is critical as a precept of development. The exhibition seeks to intertwine these vessels of perception, in order to present a complete reading of Stillwell's multi-faceted practice.

To download the artist's catalogue,
Madeline Stillwell: Performances,
please click here.

To visit the artist's website,
please click here.

For more information or to obtain high-resolution images for press purposes, please contact the gallery.

Madeline Stillwell THE WASHING - MUSEUM STAIRS C-Print, 2006

vernissage
February 6th from 19h (7pm)

exhibition
February 6 – March 6, 2010

opening hours
Wed – Sat | 12 – 18 h

location
WILDE GALLERY
Chausseestrasse 7
D-10115 Berlin
info@wilde-gallery.com
www.wilde-gallery.com