Each day Amanda sits facing her studio window, legs crossed, listening intently to her big black headphones as she researches and gathers her materials. Her studio has two shovels, a pink sparkly pig mask, sardine tins painted white, a tripod and other objects that don’t seem connected. It is her effervescence that fills the room. Amanda Struver considers any given space she occupies as a part of her practice. She continually thinks of ways to contextualize ideas and objects within the given situation, as she uses boundaries of place and the body, concepts of disarray and dysfunction, as tools for her work.
Amanda understands her practice as manic. She is continually working through multiple projects at once. However, each idea is linked by questions of various dualities, such as; personal vs universal; animal vs. human; nothing vs everything; dirty vs sterile. These questions began with the exploration of her body and the ways in which one is to behave or not behave, based on the cultural/social beliefs and norms.
She does not prefer being identified in one form or to belong to any one category, but rather she frees herself by revealing different performances of alternative selves. Examples of these performances are Pool Boi– where she had the chance to care for a pool, she performed and logged entries on Instagram of her life poolside, and Scum– another performance in which she walked around the crowds of the gallery either noticed or neglected by them and created an atmosphere that tested their tolerance through smell and behaviour.
all photos by PILOTENKUECHE International Art Program or supplied by the artist
Order vs chaos is another duality she heavily worked through. Over the course of seven months she built up a space composed of three walls in her given studio, called a “set”, and filled it with various objects, creating different scenarios. It evolved to her entering the space and recording her actions, which ranged from sitting on a block of lard, crushing eggs between her armpits, and pouring milk on the carpet only to absorb it back onto a rag until full and repeat. Through the repetition of a simple task or motion she lost sense of time and was transported out of the situation of the “set”. By bringing focus to repetition, she provokes comfortability in regularity.
“It is easy to exist within a routine, and I wonder how does this influence an experience of a reality?”
While at Pilotenkueche, Amanda will be continuing to process through a few different projects, and one that is specific to the context of this residency- in which she will be digging a hole under a bridge for Sad Baby. The hole will be dug for a set number of hours, each day. In conjunction, she will be doing a series of writings for the situation of Sad Baby, who is all of us and none of us. Through this work she will suggest a notion of routine, while emulating desperation felt from doing it all for nothing.
written by mihyun maria kim
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Come and see what Amanda creates in the following shows:
Unfinished Hase
Vernissage: 15.02.19, 19h
Open: 16 – 23.02.19, 13 – 17h
Finissage: 23.02.19 19h
Location: Alte Handelsschule, Gießerstraße 75, 04229 Leipzig, Germany
Fast Kotzen
Vernissage: 23.03.19, 19h
Open: 24 – 27.03.19 17h-20h
Location: PILOTENKUECHE, 2nd Floor, Franz-Flemming-Str. 9, 04179 Leipzig, Germany