Axel Görger & Jocko Weyland
Holz & Beton
Kunstausstellung
Oberlohnstrasse 3
78467 Konstanz
Vernissage / tunes by Sergeant Pfeffer : Saturday 05.04.2014 / 20.00
Finissage / concert with country band "Death Machine" : Friday 11.04.2014 / 20.00
daily opened from 18.30
Starting in San Diego, hard by the nexus of skateboarding’s emergence in the late 1950s, to Freiburg, where the virus had spread by the late 1970s, the two artists in this exhibition managed to forge, across time and space, a twenty-five year connection related to their passion for riding a simple plank attached by metal axles to four urethane wheels. From a first meeting and discovery of common cause at a college house affectionately dubbed “The Hut” in suburban Clairemont, California, this relationship has spanned two and a half decades through postal correspondence, as well as intermittent personal encounters in Brixlegg, Austria, and Stuttgart, Germany. Both have over the intervening years used photography in relation to skateboarding, either capturing via cameras the actual act, or the structures that skateboarders find and/or build. Along the way this has led to an increasingly formalist approach to the shapes and volumes that make up "skateable" terrain, an appreciation of not only their aesthetic qualities but the basic elements that constitute these structures: wood and cement. The exhibition’s title is matter-of-fact. On the floor, filling the space, will be an immersive installation-cum-environment using the detritus that lies around the 19th century farmhouse Görger is currently refurbishing in Münstertal, on the walls, poetical and factual photographic documentation of sundry edifices and objects surrounding the searching out and riding of various skate habitats. Juxtaposed with the jumbled, slightly haphazard yet consciously arranged assortment of planks, wagon wheels, coping blocks, doors, and old skis, the photographs combined with this grouping of workaday (and now historical) things will evoke and manifest the past as well as the future, using "thing-ness" as a motif for the repurposing of the fabricated world around us. So on one hand, rebirth, but also decay and entropy, the transience of matter, decrepitude, ruins, and the death charm. Conversely, what is featured points to how even in its transformation into obsolescence the forgotten and neglected can be simultaneously hauntingly beautiful and fodder for re-use and reinterpretation. In Görger’s photographs of the construction and completion of Linz’s Minus Bowl creation, camaraderie, and making something new are at the forefront. On the contrary, in Weyland’s images from American Flats, Nevada, Detroit, Michigan, Red Hook, Brooklyn and other mostly deserted sites, it is the aftermath, usually many years later, the desuetude, that despite abandonment still provides an arena for fun, utility, and adventure. What will exist front and center in the gallery, in three dimensions, is the collaborate configuration that turns the old into the new, or at least invites a new way of looking at the old, to an aligned but wholly different visual (and olfactory) effect. Resplendent of age and weathered charm, the physical manifestation will compliment, and well as comment on, the contrasting vibrancy and degeneration shown in the photographs on the walls, in a face-off that melds, mixes, and mines various strands of inanimate and animated pathos and hope.
the event is powered by: KULTURBÜRO KONSTANZ , LICHTBLICK and SCREWED HARDWARE
