SITE EXPLORATION: Mira O’Brien, Verónica Lehner, Alexis Knowlton, and Ana María Millán

Site Exploration: Phase Two
June 26th through July 16th, 2010
Vernissage: Saturday, June 26th, 5-8pm

Golden Parachutes is pleased to present Site Exploration, the culmination of a collaborative residency at the gallery initiated by Mira O’Brien and undertaken with three other Berlin based artists: Verónica Lehner, Alexis Knowlton, and Ana María Millán.

At its core, Site Exploration is an investigation of space. Driven by an impulse to bridge spatial and experiential gaps inherent in most site-specific work, the artists used Golden Parachutes as an institutional and geographic anchor for the exploration of sites adjacent to the gallery. A semi-vacant lot was chosen approximately 250 meters away from Golden Parachutes and sustained engagement with the site provided both the inspiration and many of the materials for the creation of a number of new works. Numerous approaches were taken to explore the spatial qualities of the site, gallery, and surrounding environs, among them surveying, documenting, transferring, recording, altering, and mapping.

The resulting works emphasize actions and interventions that continually constitute each space anew. Verónica Lehner’s ich dinge, die dinge ichen posits a physical and temporal engagement with the physical parameters of the selected site and its material components. In this work Lehner organizes rocks found on the site and traces their contours in paint before tying them with string and dragging them down Kreuzbergstr and into the exhibition space. Lehner began dragging the rocks at the beginning of the residency and will continue to do so intermittently over the course of the exhibition. This ephemeral, dynamic work is the result of a repetitive process that charts an intimate, performative engagement with space that can be further witnessed in the accumulating pile of rocks at Golden Parachutes.

During the course of the residency, the act of surveying and measuring were vital aspects of Mira O’Brien’s active observational process. Spanning nearly 4 meters by 4.6 meters, O’Brien’s new painting depicts the columns of a massive parking structure found on the site. After realizing that the space between the pillars was approximate to the length of the gallery wall, O’Brien created a scale reproduction of the structure, which curves around the ceiling and pillars of the exhibition space.

A new video work by Ana María Millán features the Schwerbelastungskörper, a 12,650 ton concrete behemoth constructed to test the ability of Berlin’s sandy soil to withstand Third Reich architect Albert Speer’s plans for Welthauptstadt Germania. Constructed on the proposed site of a massive Triumphal Arc, the Schwerbelastungskörper, is adjacent to the site chosen for Site Exploration. Continuing in the vein of her personal practice and its abiding concern with black holes in history and the relationship between official and marginal memories and culture, Millán’s video stages a performance of the iconicLili Marleen by Romanian musicians on accordion and trumpet.

Primarily inspired by the huge amounts of dirt under the parking garage on the site, Alexis Knowlton quickly associated the muck and mire of the site with pigs and decided to interpolate the narrative space of E.B. White’s acclaimed children’s book Charlotte’s Web into the site. Charlotte’s Web Allegoryis a response to both the physical attributes of the site, as well as the collaborative aspects of the residency and exhibition. Over the course of the residency Knowlton created abstract interpretations of fellow artists’ projects. Knowlton will weave a web made of string around the columns of the parking structure on the site, referencing the scene in Charlotte’s Web in which Wilbur attempts to create a web of his own. Knowlton will also create a model of the plans for the Germania project out of food objects from the Lidl (located atop the parking structure).

In order to facilitate the movement between site and gallery, a guide has been created. Conceived of as the third “site,” the book includes maps, photographs, and texts relating to the different phases of Site Exploration.

For further information or reproduction quality images please email jesi@goldenparachutes.net or call (0) 30 86 45 22 22.