Galerie Gänge's Newest Permanent Collection

An interview with Viktoria Conzelmann and Maeshelle West-Davies

Sep 10, 2021

“A tiny pop up card, held easily in hand, depicts a multicolored fish-like creature opening its mouth. On the flip side of the card is written, Feed The Organism – Fight The Monster. In my mind, a place for nature to start all over again takes form. There, weather-beaten stones rest beside the exposed concrete of contemporary architecture. Algae and fungi form partnerships and turn into lichens, ferns, and finally trees. My mind perpetually generates such imaginative sceneries.

Inspired by these instances, I create installative spaces, objects and collages that tell a futuristic and fantastical story about how the world could also be. Plant sculptures, moved into the studio from my permaculture garden, become reminiscent artefacts that could be taken from different times or realities. They remind me of fruits from alchemistic experiments, their fractured appearance irritating the bare ecosystem around them. I photograph certain plants and transfer them into collaged pictures. I grow my very own cosmos: painting on photographic film a wave I once witnessed; building a red pond shaped like a womb; producing activated carbon from my garden‘s tree cuttings to feed next year‘s crops. For some of the objects or pictures I construct, I cannot think of names: I have never seen such things in real life. The energies that force tectonic plates to move, meet and rip; the cosmoses, lives and becomings of organisms.

I use analog materials whenever possible. They hold space for chance occurrences and imperfection. I use macro-photography for abstraction and detail. Building collages allows me to visually narrate in a non-linear sense. Following this approach, my assemblages and installations are fantastical, fragmented and ongoing. They are experiments allowing space for curiosity, imperfection, unpredictability and growth, which are leading motives in my work. I admire dilettantism and engage with a wide range of materials intuitively and experimentally: photographic matter, fabric, dye, concrete, my garden.

Just as everything is in motion and constantly moving on, so am I – living and connecting fictive dots alongside thoughts, feelings, objects, friends and the organisms around me. I see my work as a root-like extension of life into the past and the future. Intra-connecting and spreading all at once. Traversing references into our ongoing life cycles. I speculate on a state of becoming, a confident utopia.”

-Viktoria Conzelmann, Artist Statement

“The beginning of what there is to perceive. The first glance taken. I imagine a state of being, when hardly any intellectual information has yet been processed. I envision a body in creation. I think about a moment, when perception is just and only that we can see and hear: A sense of light and the dampened sound of organic activity. Feel free to dive in.”

-Viktoria Conzelmann