ART CITIES:Mexico City-Erick Meyenberg
Erick Meyenberg works at the intersection of drawing, collage, video, data analysis, and sound. His work is grounded in research that uses the tools of history, science and language. History provides extensive inspiring source material in which to insert his aesthetic plans. A sense of place is an equally important influence through the natural and social landscape, the architecture, light and monuments of any given location.
Photo: haudenschildGarage Archive
Erick Meyenberg’s multimedia project “Even When Fall is Here” (2018) was inspired by the Haudenschilds’ garden in La Jolla, California. The work uses landscape designer Chris Shea´s two year working journal of the garden as a departing point for two works: a drawing installation and a multichannel audio and video installation in the garden. The collaboration between Meyenberg, Shea and the garden followed a complex process of translations from which emerged a chromatic language. One hundred pages of a journal became a chromatic score made of 45 drawings that capture the rhythm of the garden through its colors. This apparently geometric and abstract exercise has another side to it. Meyenberg challenged himself to match Shea´s ability to recognize the singularity of the colour of each flower of the garden producing an exact corresponding color in gouache and then freely incorporated silences to produce its own interpretation of the garden´s life flow. This chromatic language is further explored in the video in which Meyenberg follows Shea through a tour of the garden described solely by its colors. Meyenberg´s visual and audio edition produces a chromatic poem that unveils the deeply intimate and epidermic nature of this language. In Shea´s own words: one cannot see if one does not touch. But again this is not an abstract language, each flower dictates how it should be touched and Meyenberg offered Shea the aesthetic tools to let us in this deeply intimate, almost erotic dialogue. In Michel Tournier´s version of Robinson Crusoe “Friday or The Other Island” (Crusoe traverses different stages in his relationship with the island. One of the stages of this metamorphosis is of course the attempt to administrate and dominate the island (no surprises there) but there is another stage in which Crusoe turns her into his mate. He copulates with her and sees the fruit of this encounter in a new species of mandrake that he hadn´t seen before. One follows this process through the log of a man fighting not only with his solitude but with the implications of knowing that the whole civilization thinks that he is dead and therefore there is no Other to acknowledge his existence. These two logs (Crusoe´s and Shea´s) share a provocation. To think of the possibilities opened by allowing oneself to be intimate with a non animal being. To make alliances with tireless sunlight seekers, beings that have not internalized death. To tune into another rhythm and therefore another temporality. Perhaps even to find an Other who has faith in our existence, even when fall is here.
Info: http://haudenschildgarage.com
