A retrospective of Stéphanie Nava's drawings in five exhibitions (with an essay by
Marie de Brugerolle).
“It all began with the project for my residency in London. My initial idea was to work on a garden allotment in such a way that, somehow or other, the gardening would generate a parallel in the studio. As soon as I arrived, I put my name down for an allotment—and then I waited. (...) I began working on a plan – which evolved into a model—of my future strip of land, using manuals and archival material to decide on the layout and the varieties to be planted. (...) So I decided to create this object on paper, life-size, and gave up on the idea of actually working the soil. This large-scale installation enabled me to bring together questions of representation relating to drawing: the relationship between plane and perspective, the issue of the one-off and the series, the line as physical cutting-up of space and the connection with genres: archival, technical and botanical drawings, diagrams, etc.”.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at dkw. Kunstmuseum Dieselkraftwerk Cottbus in 2015
Born 1973 in Marseilles, Stéphanie Nava lives and works in Marseilles and Paris.
“We could say that, as a whole, my work is narrative in form. Beyond the fact of presenting an account, what interests me about stories is the way in which they articulate their constitutive elements. Representing a story means putting together a montage of different components: locations, objects, characters, all of them brought together by means of postures, gestures, distances. For me this is the place where reflection, or the “conceptual” aspect of the work, comes into it, in the assemblage that bears the meaning. Grasping an image or a story project comes down to using it to devise a whole array of meanings, theoretical propositions that go far beyond it”.
“I am interested in systems (like the child who dismantles the clock to see the cogs inside), and my work involves examining how they produce a discursive potential that can be embodied in a poetic form and, in terms of drawing, in an active image. The formula of Giordano Bruno from which the title of the exhibition is taken, ‘intelligere est phantasmata speculari' (literally translated as ‘to think is to contemplate visions', it may also be read as ‘to think is to speculate on images') sums up for me this desire to implement, through images (and, by extension, stories) the outcomes of my modest explorations, disassemblies and reconciliations”.
—Stéphanie Nava
Edited by Ulrike Kremeier and Stéphanie Nava.
Texts by
Marie de Brugerolle, Stéphanie Nava,
Ulrike Kremeier.
Graphic design: Superscript².
Published by dkw.Kunstmuseum Dieselkraftwerk Cottbus.
published in April 2015
trilingual edition (English / German / French)
18 x 22 cm (softcover)
98 pages (ill.)
ISBN : 978-3-942798-55-6
EAN : 9783942798556
in stock
