About

I am interested in the intersection of the varied meanings of the word fantasy; Utilizing crafts and aesthetics from the literary style to examine a place where mundane idle thoughts, blend with sexual desire and magic. My work branches into two series: The first are The Landscape paintings, and the second is from the Dollhouse.

The landscapes are inspired by the sweeping title sequences at the beginning of films like The Shining or The Sound of Music. These scale miniatures are constructed utilizing techniques for building terrain battle maps for tabletop roleplaying games such as Dungeons and Dragons. These maps are used for encounters to inform the physical location of things existing within the collective theater of the mind. These Landscapes are created to explore formalism and abstraction using representative materials such as cast stones, sticks, and rocks in combination with painting techniques used to create scale miniatures. These process pieces utilize craft to explore abstract compositions taken from early Nintendo games such as  Pokemon and Zelda. Through the use of craft and symbolism, these pieces provide context for the viewer of the imagined environments with which my world exists. 

Work from the Dollhouse series is initiated with the development of architectural structures that act as an extension of emotional experience rather than of physical needs. These structures, which will eventually be stitched together in related series of paintings, photographic prints, and artbooks, contain a variety of tableaus portraying a queer esoteric purgatory. These tableaus consist of a blending of formalist abstraction, rendering of figurative paintings, miniature landscape terrains, and a variety of sculpted figures and objects creating dream-like scenes exploring themes such as alienness, imprisonment, absurdity, and longing. This work is conceptually informed by my experience as a person with post-traumatic stress disorder. My symptoms lead me to feel imprisoned within the confines of my mind, bombarded with racing thoughts and constant fatigue. A life inside, insular and confined, that has only been amplified by the endless self-quarantine of Covid-19, aroused an interest in creating cinematic inspired interior scenes dripping in campy artifice. An example is Mother Medusa, a painted panoramic photograph, inspired by the movie Poltergeist, I dream of Genie, the 80’s satanic panic, and the anxiety of entering a room mid-conversation.

Info

remygierke@gmail.com