figure/ground
a collection
photo by Frank Kleinbach
Last year my son and I started collecting objects from the ground around the Schloss Solitude. Each object was a new encounter, and each encounter broke out from the infinity of pebbles, twigs, and nuts offered by the forest and gained experiential singularity. Engaged in daily gestures of observation, contact, and enchantment, we dedicated ourselves to the minimal stories that every detail revealed to us.
Over time, the objects found themselves in watercolors and were coupled with minimalist metaphors. Arranged on index cards, these poems perform a delicate caricature of classification methods. “It is an archive of the unarchivable”, wrote Carlos Marilyn Monroy in their curatorial text, “a poetic parody to reveal why we are all here. The light reflecting on our mirrored eyes can be oriented to what matters to us”.
From this quotidian and happy experience was born figure/ground, a work shown between June 1 and 24, 2022 in the exhibition "Hidden Traces" at the Akademie Schloss Solitude.
