Nowhere To Be Found
Wednesday August 19, 2015 at 7.30pm, Wellfleet Library.
Nowhere To Be Found
A talk, video installation and book signing with artist
Mathias Kessler
.
Peter McMahon, Exec. Dir. Cape Cod Modern House Trust (CCMHT) will lead a discussion of Kessler's work.
Mathias is an Austrian Born, New York based artist who has exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the, Kunsthalle Rotterdam, Rosphot National Museum for Photography, Russia; GL Holtegaard Museum, Copenhagen; and Kunstraum Dornbrin, Austria and many others. He was a CCMHT artist in residence in 2015
Spanning a decade of work, the essays focus on Mathias Kessler's investigations into the historical and contempo-rary implications of the persisting Western-Eurocentric fantasy of the natural world: an obsession with nature as both a terrifying unknown and an exploitable resource.
He pulls apart the complex movement of man and nature across this nexus of natura naturans (self- creating nature) on one hand, and natura naturata (created nature) on the other, rejecting a merely environmentalist stance. Across photography, installation, and social sculpture, Kessler probes the contemporary imagination, employing a visual language that borrows from the Romantic landscape genre and expedition photography, using empirical reason and the "sublime" as foils for an investigation that goes beyond the mere "natural" surface to explore the more complicated political and economic forces that have drastically altered the social and natural landscape. His visually arresting images and participative frameworks are sites for confron- tation with and reflection on contemporary anxieties about the environment and globalization; digitization and artificial realities; post- industrial decay and natural disasters.
Please join us for a discussion of the work and some of the issues it raises.
The video installation relates to Mathias' large public art installtion Here and Now! which is in front of the library for the month of August.
For more on Mathias Kessler go to
http://www.mathiaskessler.com/
Wellfleet Library. 55 West Main St. Wellfleet MA
In the meeting room. No charge.