Jardins d’hiver

source: we-find-wildness
In his first institutional solo exhibition – entitled A Walk In The Park – in the german part of Switzerland, ADRIEN MISSIKA orchestrated a landscape of plants, mirrored panels, projections, prints and architectures, arranged according to his very personal rules by which imagination and research, fact and fiction, reflected on each other and brought about a certain ambiguity, fascinating viewers and challenging them to question their own view of the world. Many references leapt out in this group of works – from Brazilian landscape architect and artist ROBERTO BURLE MARX* (1909-1994) to modernist architecture with its glass and steel constructions – but MISSIKA’s precision and reflection made things breathe in a way that was clearly his own.

My work is image-centered. It evolves as a permanent investigation through representation of the border between fiction and reality. I investigate the very classical field of landscape representation as compared to how humans shape landscape: through architecture. In between, you have archeology and geology. These are my interests in terms of content; I then apply these interests to a sort of image historiography. I build links and set up formal experiments. I focus in particular on collective memory (media history, societal values, etc.) and its influence on personal feelings or recognition processes (déjà vu). – ADRIEN MISSIKA for Kaleidoscope

The installation Brazilian Gardens (2013) offered a series of photographs of plants and gardens. They are shown on a display system of sculptural elements in the form of metal panels. MISSIKA has adapted this form of presentation from a system used in the botanical department of the Indian Museum in Calcutta.

Upstairs, in the skylight room of the Kunsthaus, Jardin d’Hiver (2013) comprised three bamboo towers supporting flower containers made of synthetic resin, six mirrored window panes, five flower beds and seven species of plants. For this installation, ADRIEN MISSIKA has transported BURLE MARX*’s codes of garden design into the museum space. For the construction of the bamboo towers, he is using the Asian knot technique of scaffolding, expanding the architectural space into a vertical dimension. This formal element is often used in compacted city planning as well as utopian concepts of vertical gardens and green cities. Further reminiscences to architecture are made with discarded, mirrored window panes from a modernist building, forming the horizon of the exhibition space.

The process is different for almost every one of my projects. I build up rules for a work and apply them programmatically. On principle, I do not reveal the secrets of all steps in my process. I think my work should be autonomous at a certain level. It should speak for itself. I like the fact that it has several levels of reading and multiple points of entry. As a spectator, when I visit a show by an artist I really don᾽t know, I like the freshness of discovering this work with no established universe. Then I like to read what is proposed and confront my initial feelings and ideas. In the same way, I only reveal my process as a second layer, in a different temporality than that original observation. – ADRIEN MISSIKA for Kaleidoscope

ADRIEN MISSIKA successfully conferred sculptural qualities – a sense of physical density and formal panache – to each of the elements in this exhibition. Using photography and installation, he collected the elements of a landscape and confronted the visitor with a weird version of our own -artificial – sceneries.

What the artist invites us to look at is perhaps how the world as it is presented to us related to the world that our consciouness reconstructs. In this relationship, there is a form of infinite explorations of ‘the landscape as a states of mind**‘. – DENIS PERNET
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source: moussemagazineit
The problematic history of cultural exoticism, as manifested in art, reflected Western imperialist and patriarchal attitudes toward Eastern or so-called primitive cultures. The works in “Noa Noa” represent a paradigmatic shift; unlike Primitivism and Orientalism, these works make no attempt to be ethnographic or convey a supposed authentic representation of a strange culture. Instead, they address current global conditions from a self-reflective Western position, implicitly acknowledging historical attitudes and the art that unwittingly documented them.

Willem de Rooij’s wax print on cotton, Blue to Black, recalls colonial trade routes and the migration of patterns between Asia, Africa and Europe. In the 19th century Dutch trading companies industrialized the traditional Indonesian Batik printing process and imported it to West Africa. Produced by a Dutch-owned company, Blue to Black was made in Ghana where Batik remains popular. Similarly addressing exchange and trade are the works of Nina Beier and Tobias Madison & Emanuel Rossetti. Nina Beier exhibits two new Portrait Mode works that use secondhand clothing with animal-skin patterns pressed behind glass. InDemonstrator, Beier has adhered a poster of a stock photograph of a telephone receiver to a lounge chair. Found in various locations such as New York’s Chinatown, Tobias Madison’s and Emanuel Rossetti’s ginger and produce boxes are scattered throughout the exhibition. By placing lights inside of them, Madison and Rossetti have transformed these typically disposable shipping boxes into almost ethereal versions of themselves. Verena Dengler’s works incorporate found materials and textiles that quote a range of art historical and pop culture references. Humanic and Art Deco – Wiener Festwochen – 20er Haus – Arena Wienare embroideries made from how-to kits that Dengler then placed stickers onto. Adrien Missika exhibits two planter-towers titled Jardin d’Hiver. The simple bamboo and twine constructions that hold Missika’s vibrantly colored resin planters are based on the designs of modernist Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx.

The works of Los Angeles-based artists Sam Falls and Alex Israel consider the patently fictive but persistent mythology of Southern California. Falls presents two “tire paintings” that he made by placing abandoned car tires found at the side of LA streets and freeways on top of unrolled canvases he dyed and left outside for several months. Alex Israel, whose work is an open dialogue with the art and culture of LA, presents an oversized sunglass lens that represents both the lure of sunny Southern California and the romance of Hollywood.

– See more at: http://moussemagazine.it/noa-noa-metropictures/#sthash.g41Ka3Hd.dpuf