28.04.-20.06.2021
I Think I Look More like the Chrysler Building
Vleeshal
Middelburg
Text by: Julia Mullié

I think I look more like the Chrysler Building

“I am supposed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, but I think I look more like the Chrysler Building!” It is exclaimed by a somewhat disappointed Roger DeBris, the flamboyant character from Mel Brooks’ American comedy The Producers, who has dressed up and assesses his own costume. The title of this exhibition alludes to an important question: how does our body relate to urban space? The city shows similarities with the human body in function and characteristics. This relationship between city and body also manifests itself in our use of language. Consider for example the way we use words from the domain of architecture and city planning to describe social and personal matters, such as “team building”, “breaking through the glass ceiling”, or “the walls have ears”.

Architecture can enable us to position ourselves within the world and to define ourselves in relation to others. The artists in I Think I Look More like the Chrysler Building show that you can also reposition and redefine yourself by imagining a different architecture. This is necessary because architecture and urban planning in the West are often all too one-sidedly based on the idea of creating a Utopia. The proposed solutions and grids may be ideal in theory, but are often detached from the subjective experience of everyday life. By manipulating their environment—or the other way around; by complying with it—the artists in this exhibition explore ways to relate to their surroundings in a more personal way.

The word “space” alone already contains a paradox: on the one hand it refers to demarcation, on the other hand to the infinite. In addition to a physical dimension, space also has a social dimension. In 1929 Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own in which she reflects upon the following question: Where are you truly free as a woman? Within the walls of your own room or in the world outside?

The artists in I Think I Look More like the Chrysler Building create personal spaces that allow them to navigate through the public ones. The public spaces assigned to us are mostly based on rational principles and rooted in economic motives. They have a normalizing power that also has a major psychological and social impact. To counter this, these artists collect and assemble materials that reflect themselves, and create imaginary landscapes that—unlike actual landscapes—can define and represent the individual. Thanks to architecture and decoration, we can create spaces that allow us to live our lives the way we want, outside the normative frameworks of society.

Kasper Bosmans, Lena Henke, Win McCarthy, Annelies Planteijdt and Diane Simpson each navigate through the urban landscape in their own way, but they all investigate similar issues: how can our environment be mapped? To what extent are the body and psyche subject to this environment? And can the body and the city influence each other?

Vleeshal would like to thank Bortolami Gallery, New York, THE EKARD COLLECTION and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam, for their generous support.
Lena Henke (Germany, 1982) expands the range of meaning of traditional sculpture by incorporating questions of femaleness and the production of power relations in urban space. In doing so, she not only engages the myth of masculinity; she also works with the strands of historical tradition—the questions of pedestal and space—to interrogate the logic of sculptural representation and representability. She holds the reins with great self-assurance, controlling the representation of women's bodies and its intervening in the mechanisms of urban architecture. It is Henke’s far-reaching reflections on the capacity of the sculptural that enable her, conversely, to grasp urbanity as a historically evolved sculpture, whose social mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion can be altered and redefined by means of targeted interventions.

The three houses installed in the center of the Vleeshal are ceramic miniatures of the "crooked house" (1552), which is part of the famous “Park of Monsters” in Bomarzo (Italy), a mannerist sculpture park commissioned by Pier Francesco Orsini in the 16th century. The clear plexi glass plinths bear witness to Middleburg’s geographical location surrounded by water on a peninsula in Zeeland (Netherlands). Each of the pedestals has a different hight and thereby various angles, while evoking the idea of the houses sitting on the surface of water or gliding above a block of ice. Henke’s fascination for Surrealism and in particular by the art movement’s close relationship to psychoanalysis, humor and the subconscious are at play here.

Vleeshall's significant floor pattern stays visible underneath the translucent plinths and evokes memories of New York’s famous urban street grid. Above this quasi city map hang green street signs, dangling on long rusty chains and hooks, which where formerly used in meat production. In its aesthetics reminiscent of the street and avenue signage in New York, the imaginary names are based on puns like “STEELPATTERN" and “MYDROWNINGDOWNTOWN”, bringing together emotional states with artistic materials and names of urban places. In connecting the “city” with the “sky”, the ceiling with the floor, Henke emphasises the specific spatiality of the Vleeshalle and creates an expanded sense of (urban) space.