MARIELE NEUDECKER
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AMBASSADOR
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September 14, 2006 - February 28, 2007
At the Republic Tower
cnr LaTrobe and Queen Sts, Melbourne
Viewable 24hr daily
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Presented by ACCA in association with the Visible Art Foundation
The latest installment on the Republic Tower (corner Queen and La Trobe) features a work by German-born artist Mariele Neudecker. Titled Ambassador, the work features three images – the central, largest image being a replica of a female skull which becomes distorted when viewed from different angles.
According to Neudecker, Ambassador clearly “references THE AMBASSADORS painting by Holbein that was commissioned by Henry the 8th in 1533, hence the layering of still life and portrait elements. The globes in the shelf are a photographic image taken with a fisheye lens of the egyptian valley of the kings and queens ('Land of the Dead') in Luxor, the multitude of metaphorical books are present in a 'numb' catalogue, not revealing contents, and only marked by a clear plastic ruler. At the centre of this almost 3 dimensional group of images is the undistorted but cropped female human skull, injectionmoulded and cast in plastic.
“I am interested in how the anamorphic distortion is here only a remembered image to us - however I hope there is a new, much more physical and real distortion of the vast image, especially for pedestrians looking up, and also a strange completion of the top of the head by the crust of the earth. The perspective of the viewer is hopefully challenged in terms of its physical placement and its conceptual or mental position to what we are looking at - where we are looking from, and why.”
Ambassador is the latest in an ongoing collaboration between the Visible Art Foundation and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Curator, ACCA’s Artistic Director Juliana Engberg, says: “Mariele's work joins the long line of Vanitas works in art history. The skull provides us with an opportunity to reflect upon mortality. But made, as this one is, from synthetic materials, rather than bone, we might be drawn to thoughts that life has become artificial and perpetual. A morbid thought. There is something to be said for dust to dust.”
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