Generation, an exhibition of the collaborative work of Czech film-maker Tereza Stehlíková and American sculptor Rosalyn Driscoll
GV Art Gallery, London, 2013
This five-part installation fills two floors of the gallery. The first part occupies the upper floor and represents the above-ground world of Persephone, embodied by Stehlikova’s daughter. The lower floor holds four stations with videos of the four generations of Stehlikova’s family, projected into Driscoll’s sculptures, which also represent life in the underworld of Hades, where he abducted Persephone.
This haunting installation merges video and sculpture to explore the progression of life through four generations of women. Drawing from the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, the artists embrace the tensions between surface and interior, world and underworld, conscious and unconscious, and life and death.
Stehlíková filmed her grandmother, mother and daughter in their country house in Bohemia, focusing her camera on the bonds, tensions and displacements between the generations. Driscoll’s sculptures are made of translucent, amber-colored rawhide (dried cow skin), which receive and transform the video projections. The projected light animates the sculptures, while their visceral physicality reveals a hidden dimension under the women’s seemingly composed surfaces. Four groupings of sculpture sit on suspended perspex platforms that float in the dark “underworld”.
Driscoll and Stehlíková make multisensory art that explores the tactile, proprioceptive, kinesthetic, spatial dimensions of embodied human experience. They are members of Sensory Sites, a collective that creates installations exploring the integration of the senses in art. This exhibition is part of their ongoing research into the aesthetic experience using micro-phenomenology, an in-depth interview method developed by French philosopher Claire Petitmengin.
GV Art catalogue: https://issuu.com/gvart/docs/gv_art_-_
