March 24, 25, 2017
ホテル-Hotel Surrogates
By Josiane Keller
ホテル-Hotel (reads: “hotel – hotel”): an ongoing long-term project started in Jan 2016, using lens-based images (currently over 1000+) of hand-made, small-scale puppets. The underlying narrative is of a fictive long-term residency hotel and its tenants, depicted in casual intimate snap-shots;
The project is inspired by Nan Goldin’s “Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, Larry Clark’s “Tulsa”, Peter Hujar, the HOTEL CHELSEA and others, investigating the human sense of seeing and visual memory, the use of photographs as well as puppets as surrogates, the effect of “evidence” a camera adds to an image, and fetishism around images depicting the intimate life of marginalized people.
The project has been so far shown in exhibitions in Tokyo and Budapest as photo-installation of small scale prints, this time at Automata it will be shown for the first time as live slide show.
Josiane Keller is an Austrian-German visual artist currently dividing her time between LA and Japan, working with lens-based images of hand-made small-scale puppets. After studying ceramics, painting and dance and working as a puppeteer, ceramicist, painter and stage photographer she developed this particular style of work that combines all her interests and is underlying investigations of the human sense of seeing, visual memory, visual communication, materialism, loss and group behavior as well as specifically traditional and contemporary construction and purpose of puppets.
Keller started working in this technique since a 2012 long-distance collaboration with a group of street youth from Portland, OR, in which the participants gave anonymous interviews inclusive written descriptions of themselves which were turned into small sale-scale figurines and then photographed (“Each reflection of myself echoes a different emotion at me”); after this project she kept working in this style and developed the originally all-clay figures eventually into more expressionistic puppets with simple joints, costumes and hair.
She has created various long term projects of series of still as well as moving images and collaborated with singers, musicians, film makers, puppeteers and writers; her work has been exhibited and won awards in the US and internationally.
www.josianekeller.com
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.