source: neumeisterbaram

Steciw / de Joode was born in 2012. This ongoing collaboration between Kate Steciw and Rachel de Joode investigates issues of ownership and authorship, materiality as it is experienced in networked culture and the mutable nature of both image and information over time and space.

Steciw / de Joode perform ‘Open for Business’ – an exhibition that straddles the divide between performance and installation.

Open for Business has been performed 4 times so far; one time in New York at Stadium gallery (February 2013), one time in Mexico City at Casa Maauad (May 2013), at Neumeister Bar-am in Berlin (May 2014)and last time during Artissima, Turin, as part of the Per4m section (November 2014).
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source: berlinartlink

Berlin-based Rachel De Joode examines the world of things in her recent show The Molten Inner Core at Neumeister Bar-Am, and will collaborate with artist Kate Steciw in a shop-style performance and installation for Gallery Weekend in May.

Before an object, material, or idea is understood – before it has a name – language relegates it to being a ‘thing.’ Not until it is cut open, taken apart, appropriated, used or misused, do we begin to know it, and consequently title it appropriately, as needed. It is then that this thing can become ours to categorize and organize within our systems of knowledge.

Dutch-born, Berlin-based artist Rachel De Joode inverts this process in her study of “things,” and returns them back for refreshed and deconstructed viewing, wherein we once again feel unsure or almost suspicious about the objects with which we co-exist. In her most recent solo exhibition, The Molten Inner Core, on view until the 26th at Neumeister Bar-Am, Rachel continues to reassemble and decontextualize the common and the known, bringing into question their pre-assumed place within our symbolic systems and worlds of knowing.

De Joode presents an egalitarian cast of object-characters, from delicate clay forms on pedestals to a powerfully large standing photograph of skin. Each object appears as pure surface, allowing them to be free of any kind of definitive framework. De Joode breathes new questions into the phenomena of our environment and the way in which things are moulded and changed by the actions of our own hands: in this case, De Joode’s hands. Agency (25 Photographs of Things) pulls in reference to the Kodak family portrait collection, where photographs of dust stand alongside a photograph of a meteorite, nearby portraits of her own hand presenting moulded, dewy surfaces of ambiguous grey goo and clay. Asking for these items to be viewed for their connections to one another first, and then, but less immediately, to us, their imagined histories remain fluid and loose, as these framed materials liberally converse with one another. Meanwhile, the artist’s hand intervenes into these “portraits,” almost as a sideshow to these now central and animated materials.

Berlin Art Link, Rachel de Joode, The Molten Inner Core, Installation View“The Molten Inner Core”, Installation View at Neumeister Bar-Am; Photograph courtesy of Neumeister Bar-Am

It is this kind of manipulation of object roles that connects this most recent show with the broader scope of De Joode’s photo work. Her dedication within her practice to the investigation of objects’ context and connotation is an outgrowth of her spanning body of work in photography and the ubiquitous still life, perhaps not coincidentally also a genre of Dutch mastery. That photography merges all-too seamlessly with the online sphere, standing on our screens against the white pixel background of art websites, is carefully considered in de Joode’s image and mixed-media work. Her photo-based sculptures speak to their coming, immaterial life on-screen, wherein art floats on and falls away into new spheres of symbolic definition. In Sculpted Human Skin in Rock (I & II) – a flesh-toned photo collage rising and falling from the sturdy foundations of marble – the illusory two-dimensional character of this ethereal pair brings a heightened awareness to the very setting of a gallery, the viewer’s presence within this semi-public space, and acts as a cautionary premonition for it’s soon-to-come life online.

With sensitive placement, these things transcend our human-centered vision of the world, of which language historically has played a dominant role in our process for understanding. Perhaps this is why each work is so simply titled with nothing more than a few descriptors, holding back any kind of suggestive bias or frame from which to learn about each thing.

What we come to realize by her process is that the world is less ours than we may imagine it ought to be, as her re-appropriation of objects and materials render each free to move away from stable definitions and human-imposed hierarchy. They return to wander within a loosely associated cosmos of materials, relating into new contexts together, irrespective of any knowledge or human-centered ontology we usually, often subconsciously, impart upon them.

With the upcoming Open for Business collaboration, the third manifestation of a project Rachel de Joode has been working on with U.S.-based artist Kate Steciw, De Joode merges her practice in a one day “pop-up shop” within Neumeister Bar-Am for Gallery Weekend (May 5th). As both a performance and installation project, Open for Business plays with the operative routines of the art market, as the two collaborate to complete a piece before the end of the relegated 10-6 workday. The two build on their common interest in photography as a generative practice and investigate questions surrounding ownership, production, industry, and the limitations and possibilities of image and information over time and space.

Understandably, De Joode has been busy with her “things,” but we managed to talk to her about just that.