Kim Schoen: Group show at LOUCHE OPS, Berlin and TAKES UP residency at AiR35, Cascais
Group show ‘Green Lobby’:
Visit Kim Schoen’s group show ‘Green Lobby’ at the gallery LOUCHE OPS, curated by James Krone.
Saturdays 1-6 (or by appointment)
Viktoria Luise Platz 6
10777 Berlin
Image courtesy of Louche Ops
Kim Schoen is showing some of her new work from her artificial flower project, entitled Negative Bouquets. These images are of cut-out remnants from silk flower production at M&S Schmalberg, one of the oldest continuously operating artificial flower manufacturers in New York City. The show includes artists Beckett MWN, José Montealegre, and James Krone.
From the press release:
While the purposes and qualities belonging to artificial plants vary depending on which historical context one is considering, their modern use typically places them in peripheral spaces, like docile apologies for the abrasive vacuity of corporate architecture.
The presence of a plastic plant implies that an actual one would die if put in its place, due either to inhospitable conditions or neglect. As if projecting their own lifelessness, this form of decor lends to the general effect of waiting rooms, lobbies, and malls, the feeling of an unconvincing theatrical set. Perhaps it's ambient novocaine intended to prepare us for the types of depersonalized experiences we could expect to have in such places.
The title of Philip K Dick's novel UBIK refers to the brand name of a fictional aerosol product (short for ubiquity) capable of producing various trompe l'oeil surfaces depicting whichever effects of futurity or nostalgia might be desired, when sprayed upon the scaffolding of a deteriorating urban infrastructure. It's a vision from fifty years ago picturing the time we live in now as a panorama of unrelated desires plastered over one another, vying to distract from the vacancy of its support.
Relieved from their utility as corporate set design, artificial plants have also been released from the task of verisimilitude. In retirement, they've become more reflective as signs, possessing an embedded index of what it is to have been used as a foil.
Some still collect dust in hotel lobbies or doctors' offices like props left behind, seemingly to preserve a 20th century effect. Removing them could imply that the infrastructure they once served has quietly evolved and that they've been replaced by an all encompassing rebar of vegetative plasticity.
James Krone
Image courtesy of Louche Ops
Image courtesy of Louche Ops
More about the event : HERE
IN residency at AIR351 Cascais:
For her upcoming artist residency Kim Schoen will be at AiR351 in Cascais, Portugal.
From March 15th until the end of June.
The artist will be making new video work. Her research will focus on the irrationalities and intricacies of artificial plant production and distribution, and will extend to the artificial ecosystems of The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Garden and Estufa Fria de Lisboa. She will be working with the Department of Plant Biology at the University of Lisbon on the variable rates of decay of natural and petroleum-based plants.
More about the residency: HERE
Negative Bouquet (Yellow), 28” x 16”, Giclée print on 12 mm silk satin, 2023
About the artist:
Kim Schoen’s work in video installation, photography, and text engages the rhetoric of display. Her absurdist, experimental approach takes on objects and language that try to persuade or convince us of something, using them as raw materials to say something new.
Schoen has exhibited her work at MMoCA; Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles; Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Roma; BAM; South London Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, MOT International, London; Kunstverein Springhornhof; Kleine Humboldt Galerie, Berlin; and Young Projects and Richard Telles Fine Art, in Los Angeles. Her work is included in private and public collections, and has been written about in Artforum, Mousse, Art in America, The Los Angeles Times, and Hotshoe International. Her own writing (‘Cracking Walnuts: Nonsense and Repetition in Video Art’, ’The Serial Attitude Redux', 'The Expansion of the Instant: Photography, Anxiety, Infinity') can be found in X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. Kim is also the co-founder, publisher and editor of MATERIAL, a journal of writing by artists.
She lives and works in Berlin.
Kim Schoen, Still from TELL ME WHO I AM/ I AM WHAT YOU SAY, double-channel video installation, 22 min, in solo exhibition The Hysteric’s Discourse, Young Projects, Los Angeles 2018
Hawaii (160) artist's book 2017
More about Kim Schoen