Theresa Ganz
Statement
Theresa Ganz
Artist Statement
This work is made from organic forms I have documented photographically and then cut out with a scalpel and assembled into a somewhat 3-dimensional collage. I have painted the cut out pieces with watercolor, both front a back, allowing me to use the pieces in deep relief. In assembling the collages I thought about gesture, in the expressionist sense, to give them form. I have made small, loose watercolors, which I have then scanned and printed very large using an inkjet printer to serve as a substrate for some of the pieces, giving the collage an environment in which to exist.
The work is influenced by anthroposophical art, Redon’s monsters, James Turrell’s light sculptures. Redon’s monsters, because each collage seems to me somehow creature-like, and even monstrous considering the scale. James Turrell, because the idea of the color field substrate came directly from his work. The influence of anthroposophical art, that is art in the school of Rudolf Steiner, the late 19th- early 20th century Austrian philosopher, comes from the formative years I spent at the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City. The education, which included many hours making loose watercolors in the manner of Emil Nolde’s studies, was also deeply informed by turn of the century German nationalist movements and the teachings of Goethe (physics was Goethe’s color theory.) The education, which is very concerned about the life of the imagination, gave us the mental landscape, through fairy tales and play, of a mythical the Black Forest. On the one hand, I had in my head a Romanticized Germany, and on the other my grandfather and his family fled Cologne after the Nazi takeover, never to see many of their relatives again (my grandmother fled Vichy France). While, this work is not a declaration regarding this apparent conflict, it is an expression of cognitive dissonance- it comes out a desire for, and a wariness of, a dark and magical forest.