Birgit Rathsmann
Birgit Rathsmann’s characters find support, post trauma,
in photographed images of abandoned half built structures.
Place is the Space Gallery Tour
Hi! Can you introduce yourself?
BR: I'm an artist and an animator. For the past few years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how my work relates to its audience, how it finds its audience and what it wants to do with the audience when it finds it. It is an interest that grew out of having been transplanted to a very different culture when I was a kid. I had to re-orient myself around this new culture and think about my role in it. Later on, I decided to transplant myself to New York where I get to play many different roles, which is something I love.
The base of your drawings are photographs of abandoned structures (more specifically abandoned half built structures in Mexico). The characters are then drawn on top of the photograph. You wrote recently that the characters represent individuals recovering from trauma. I love the idea of the abandoned and the hurt are leaning into one another to create stability.
I just put about 10 of the drawings up in a pizza place that went out of business over the past year. The exhibit is about rebuilding and erasure. Everything from the pizza place is still there: the ovens, the sacks of flour, the display vitrine. Classic Manhattan pizza place without the pizza and drawings instead. What you pointed out is exactly I loved hanging them in the abandoned pizza place!
When I first spoke to you about the work, you mentioned you were setting up meetings via FaceTime with random participants. You would show each participant your stack of drawings and ask them to choose 8 to 10 drawings that you would then keep (I am guessing you discarded the rest?) I love the shift the participant makes from observer to curator. Our enjoyment in art or our preference towards individual pieces within a series rarely has weight in the future of the piece or series.
BR: Yes, it's a really great experience to let different people reflect back to you what speaks to them. I asked about 20 people to make selections. There was quite a bit of variation, but there was also a lot of overlap of what people liked, which drawings worked and why.
The use of language here reminds me of the language we associate with memes or quick quips on Twitter. They are not used to explain the image but more precisely they use the image as a tool to communicate bigger ideas, opinions, critiques of current culture. Would you say that’s accurate in your images also?
BR: I think of the lines as something the characters in the drawings might have stuck in their head, maybe it's phrase that pops in their head when they wake up, or when their blood sugar is low.
What have you been listening to / reading / watching / enjoying lately?
I just discovered Caron Wheeler's album Beach of the War Goddess, and I love it.
