Anna – Katharina Mields í gestavinnustofu Gilfélagsins

Anna – Katharina Mields is currently undertaking a one-month residency in the guest studio of the Gil society in akureyri.

During her stay she will show at gallery DaLí (opening 19.07. 'Sibille') and for a weekend at gallery deiglan (25.07. -27.07.) a collaboration between her and the Berlin based artist Linda Franke will be shown.

Anna Mields recent work deals with association themes of still life tradition and hyperreality. She is using simple ways of reproduction as a starting point and plays with moments and aesthetics of exaggerated reality. Often presented or displayed on structures like furniture or architectural elements a banal object (often food) becomes a character or fetish in its appearance.
In her work display and object are even parts of the sculptural sign. There she constructs associations around the everyday object of the domestic space and the disregarded object in the public space.

Deliberately Mields is constructing moments when controlled or constrained actions happen to those chosen objects. Through this a state of mind is projected onto them and the object is loaded up with meaning and value. Almost too weak to carry its given weight associations are changed and meaning is shifting.

Either captured with the camera or forced into the stillness of a sculptural state, the object itself is then trapped in its narcissistic cycle.

Within the video everyday food products occur alienated from its usual appearance and there specific movement is created through a reformative act. Within those situations the former disregarded object gains meaning signifying different conditions of the human body.

Things fall. Things are thrown. Cucumber, onion, shoes, flour…

According to Heidegger, we are 'thrown' into the world: it exists before our appearance, it did not invite us. We do not invent our being; we enter into being that is always already present in the world. What enters here the outside world is foodstuff. It flies out and just the sound reminds us of the fatal impact on the ground. (Video loop foreign body sensation, 2006)

In the video 'Falling Lettuce', architectural elements control and direct the movement of the organic shape of a lettuce head. The lettuce head rolls, falls, and gets smashed on top of a perfect, shiny white staircase: a staircase to heaven just populated by lettuce, rhythmically and repetitively falling down. Is it a kitchen surface? Why is lettuce falling? Is it a rolling head?

Alienated and fragmentary appears the Everyday object in Mields work and through this she generates humorous and absurd questions. The mysticism is hidden but always encouraging and playing with associations to the human body.

Mields is interested in the subtle mysticism in Icelanders everyday life, which stands in a crass contrast to the present state of Hi-tech industry and tourism on their island.
I am coming Iceland!