Exhibition from 27th September until 5th October 2013 GV Art gallery, London, 49 Chiltern Street, Marylebone, London W1U 6LY
A collaborative work by Rosalyn Driscoll and Tereza Stehlíková
“Every grain of wheat and every maiden contains all its descendants and all her descendants—an infinite series…the abyss of the nucleus.”
Kerenyi, Essays on the Science of Mythology
GV Art presents Generation, an exhibition of the collaborative work of Czech film-maker Tereza Stehlíková and American sculptor Rosalyn Driscoll. This haunting installation merges video and sculpture to explore the progression of life through generations of women. Drawing from the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, the artists embrace the tensions between surface and interior, world and underworld, conscious and unconscious, and life and death.
Stehlíková filmed her grandmother, mother and daughter in their country house in Bohemia, focusing her camera on the bonds, tensions and displacements between the generations. Driscoll’s sculptures are made of translucent, amber-colored rawhide (dried cow skin), which receive and transform the video projections. The projected light animates the sculptures, while their visceral physicality reveals a hidden dimension under the women’s seemingly composed surfaces. Four groupings of sculpture sit on suspended perspex platforms that float in the dark “underworld”.
Driscoll and Stehlíková make multisensory art that explores the tactile, proprioceptive, kinesthetic, spatial dimensions of embodied human experience. They are members of Sensory Sites, a collective that creates installations exploring the integration of the senses in art. This exhibition is part of their ongoing research into the aesthetic experience using an in-depth interview method developed by French philosopher Claire Petitmengin.
About the artists
Stehlíková works as an artist filmmaker, and a writer. She is a research coordinator at the Royal College of Art, animation department and also a lecturer at the University of Westminster. She is a founder of Sensory Sites, (www.artintouch.co.uk). She is currently developing a collaboration with professor Charles Spence of Cross Modal Research Laboratory, Oxford, investigating the interactions between the senses and their application in the medium of moving image. Stehlíková holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art, where she researched the tactile language of the moving image. www.terezast.com
Driscoll is a sculptor living in Massachusetts, USA, whose work has long explored integrating into art the senses of touch, movement, and proprioception. Her work has been exhibited internationally and received awards from the Dartington Hall Trust, UK, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, New England Foundation for the Arts, and Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is a member of the international collective, Sensory Sites. www.rosalyndriscoll.com.
GV Art is the UK’s leading contemporary art gallery which aims to explore and acknowledge the inter- relationship between art and science, and how the areas cross over and inform one another. The gallery curates exhibitions and events that stimulate a dialogue focused on how modern society interprets and understands the advances in both areas and how an overlap in the technological and the creative, the medical and the historical are paving the way for new aesthetic sensibilities to develop.
