Reloaded

Bessie Nager exhibits complex visual clusters developed in direct confrontation with the content and structures of the Internet. Her cityscapes show kaleidoscope-like condensed images of medially conveyed works. Deep-reaching spaces blur in multifocal escape points, create multi-dimensional stages and evoke the beguiling simultaneity of the hyperspace.

The two work cycles of the “Reloaded” exhibition are directly linked to the large-scale projects Bessie Nager recently presented at the Helmaus Zürich (2006) and at the Kunstmuseum Luzern (2007). The exhibition’s title, along the overriding importance of resumption, refers to the artist’s favored proceeding methods: collage and assemblage. With their highly compressed urban landscapes and their deconstructed tramway, Bessie Nager’s images and objects perfectly suit the depiction of everyday life by dealing directly with the media’s form and function.

The artist took the pictorial motives of her urban landscapes from the predominant medium of information of our society; the Internet. In the form of a comparative inquiry, the artist captures the manifold forms of social image production based on the theme of public space, relating the works to each other by content-grouping them. The abundance and density of the innumerable fragments result in an overflowing composition that ignores all conventions. In their overabundance, the collages stress on the impossibility of grasping the contents of the collective stored information at fist glance.

Nager does not only tackle the issue of “information overload”, which is the flood of information our society is subject to. Indeed, her Cityscapes suggest a solution, through which the network-shaped structure of the Internet can be visualized. Her image-worlds are characterized by a highly associative approach, which does not specify a linear reading structure but rather functions according to the cluster-principle. With her work, Nager opens up virtual mind maps suggesting a possible orientation to the extensive network. Nonetheless, the effect of “Lost in Hyperspace” does not defuse itself through this navigation aid but actually determines the mood of the eroded picture worlds, classified as web-ontologies. The untraceable space presented in front of a black ground is no longer subject to the laws of gravity and is characterized by a beguiling simultaneity, in which private and societal political events abruptly collide in a euphoric and apocalyptic manner.

Biography Bessie Nager