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MARIECHEN DANZ
Mariechen Danz
www.wsimag.com

27.07.2018

Wentrup is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by Mariechen Danz at the gallery.

With sculptures, drawings, costumes and installations, Danz examines the history of knowledge transfer, placing the body and language at the center of her process-based practice. Using subjective mapping, Danz links elements from a seemingly infinite vocabulary of handed down symbols towards a simultaneous representation. From a critical as well as affirmative perspective, she studies and documents the process of constructing history through scientific imagery, in which it is people and not facts who determine history. The artist undermines traditional and historical conventions of linear historiography, questioning both intuitive and intellectual knowledge and develops a dialog between applied means and individual narratives.

In Ore Orientation: modular mapping system, Danz employs industrial metal panels – the latest development of her cooperation with Genghis Khan Fabrication Co. which began in 2013 – as a carrier of an infinitely expandable recording system. As the proverbial “ore,” the material aluminum is ultimately processed soil, made flat and milled to become thin, punched, and finally coded. The pre-existing templates are punching dies of various sockets, plug systems and ventilation slots from the sector of electronic information and data transmission, all enable data transfer – just as punctuation marks aid in the communication of the written word. The rearrangement and grouping results in an analog, codified system, which is based on transmitters and support systems of knowledge transfer. Danz traces stylized planispheres and in doing so isolating historic world maps and anatomical representations of various cultures and eras, reducing them to their essential particularities. In this way, she traces a history of ancient information carriers that testify to continuously changing worldviews. The shadows cast through these matrices manifest the changeable perspective and result in new possible mappings where the formal vocabulary of data processing creates independent cartographies.