World Views
(Yasmin Afschar )
If we were to define the temporal aspect of Maureen Kaegi’s works, we could look at its structure in terms of the “moment.” That short instant, which, recurring thousands and thousands of times, cumulates in our seeing, but now and then breaks away from our stream of impressions and, as an extracted fragment of reality, forces itself into our active consciousness. We seldom know why a sight has given us pause to reflect, nevertheless, our iconic memory mostly falls back on those memories which, for whatever reasons, stand out from the abundance of everyday perceptions.
Serving as a display of such ephemeral memories, Maureen Kaegi’s installative arrangements connect photography, drawing, painting, and video through a mesh of reciprocal relationships. Rendered in various media, these details of reality form transitory perceptual spaces, the special quality of which lies in the fact that they lend to the unbelievably fleeting moments in question another temporal dimension, namely that of contemplation.
Not least, this shift is owed to Maureen Kaegi’s approach to different techniques. Jumping between media is a device frequently used in the production of contemporary art, particularly by young artists. In contrast to older generations of artists, they are no longer concerned with the analysis of and intense involvement with techniques they apply. Until recently, however, this appeared imperative in the wake of the fundamental extension of the concept of art a few decades ago. The works of many upcoming artists are distinguished by their unbiased and playful approach to various media – in a self-confident manner, genres are chosen because a motif or subject appears to call for their use.
The deciding factor for Maureen Kaegi’s choice of medium derives from the everyday moments and the peculiarities she aims to capture. Here, the focus is on the “images” produced by various techniques; images that are intended to work both as references to the real and building blocks of illusionistic parallel worlds. In probing the different space-time structures of painting, photography, drawing, and video, Maureen Kaegi lives up to this double claim. Painting, for instance, a sui generis time storage device, converges with photography, a supposedly objective rendering of reality. The painted picture cumulates numerous past events – there’s no need for us to know whether brush strokes are separated by seconds or years. It is crucial, however, that the picture we perceive as a whole has passed through sometimes many, sometimes few intermediate stages. Thus, it is subject to other temporal principles than photography, which captures a detail of reality at precisely the moment when the shutter was released. Kaegi’s large-format works on paper, finally, make no secret of their time-consuming genesis. Where pencil strokes are grouped to form the umpteenth reiteration of semi-abstract structures, the unfolding of a drawing becomes virtually measurable. With video, another frequently used medium, duration is elementary in producing meaning. However, with the forms of presentation Kaegi creates specially for each work, such as projections on the floor or monitors disguised as “pictures” on the wall, she undermines the distinctly narrative temporal structure of this technique, which is geared towards a certain duration, and puts the focus on the movement in the picture. Accordingly, “Laubblatt, 2010” (“Foliage Leaf, 2010” – a picture, taken with a cell phone camera, of a little leaf hanging by a spider’s thread) is not so much about the story of a leaf swaying in the wind as about functioning with regard to painting theory’s episteme of the window as an opening; as a view of an illusionistic perceptual space.
Maureen Kaegi’s subversive handling of time-related features of media she uses contributes to a condensation of perspectives; to a multilayered complexity that always remains fragile and equivocal, provides approximations, hints. All this results in the moment of contemplation described above. The indexical quality of photography and video is thwarted and repetition calls the authenticity of painting and drawing gestures into question. Tangible elements, taken from the world around us, are abstracted and defamiliarized. If the photo of a laptop screen (“Ohne Titel, 2010” / “Untitled, 2010”) is recognized as such at all, it is only by the cursor in the middle of a pixel landscape. It’s all the more surprising how closely related the doubly abstracted image motif and the clouds painted with oil on aluminum appear. The gray-white pastose structures form shapes that never develop beyond the stage of a vague sketch of a sky; the same is true for the series of pencil strokes strung together to form a “Nachthimmel” (“Night Sky”) in the drawing series of the same name.
In transitional spaces, Kaegi’s works move between figuration and abstraction, between reality and fiction. The surfaces of reality they touch become translucent through their visual rendering. They open up our view of the peculiar quasi reality of Maureen Kaegi’s cosmos of imagery. However, while the motifs in her works are mostly taken from banal everyday situations – there’s no scarcity value in the aesthetics of a flickering light bulb, computer screen, or gray November sky – as they are translated into a chosen medium, they are subjected to a process of defamiliarization and alienation that changes their reference to reality into a relative one. Thus, these works depict a kind of parallel world that examines our daily routines for their subtle, occasionally curious manifestations that usually escape our attention. Again, what is significant is the detailed and fragmentary character of these works, which are frequently kept in a state of intimation. Thus, the repeated depiction of motifs along with the corresponding numbering in the titles (“Berg 1,” “Berg 2,” “Berg 3” / “Mountain 1,” “Mountain 2,” “Mountain 3”) is not intended to visually capture the world that surrounds us but as an approximation of what this motif can reveal to us with regard to that very special moment.
Maureen Kaegi’s practice as a process of deceleration and calming – the gentle approximation to a thing she seeks to articulate in her works, which, however, is unstable to the extent that, again and again, it disappears, fleeting and incomprehensible. Maureen Kaegi tries to narrow it down, moves closer and takes a step back, holds on.