German born artist Andrea Loefke lives and works in Brooklyn, New York – constructing conglomerates of material and form, working from innumerable materials, both decorative and everyday. These supplies overflow from the categorized shelves and bins of her studio. In fabricating these often vivid multiform assemblages, Loefke employs a myriad of techniques expressing ambiguous thoughts and sensations. These fairy-like worlds are complex structures incorporating multiple objects, colours and textures, resulting in what could be described as playful and mysterious landscapes, enticing the viewer into visual narrative journeys.
PB: These are intended as 'magical' journeys for the viewer? - to traverse the sculptural elements of the work through textures, substances and form, and the relationships and dialogues of this particular vocabulary?
AL: I develop pathways for the viewer to travel. I link the vocabulary of micro with macro worlds, encourage notions of irritation, and implied movement of the objects, and ask the viewer to relate themselves to the objects and the situations they present. I am interested in creating a place, with the capacity to crack open a well of associations and allow the viewer to feel, to dream, to fantasize, be irrational, subjective and intuitive. Specific or vague personal memories are awakened. The viewer is asked to weave his or her own story and sensations, to believe and to wonder.
PB: You mention; "the capacity to crack open a well of associations" – this draws me back to Francis Bacon's statement on his painting; "to open the valves of feeling" – there is after all a desire within you to facilitate the viewer toward "experiencing" these spaces and feeling their way?
AL: To wonder, to believe, to let go and dip into a different world full of associations, that's what I like the viewer to experience. In the end to create a place that interweaves a waft of magic, child-like/naive, with lurid, mysterious and abstruse elements. After all everyone brings their own stories, experiences, personalities with them when viewing my work. I like to trigger sensations based on shared experiences we have with certain objects, materials, colors, textures and ways of building and making.
From here the viewer is free to knit his or her own narrative around the work and dip into a world full of wonder and ambiguity. Very often the combination of objects and ways of altering known elements add a bewildering and challenging aspect for the viewer and hopefully makes them pause, be curious, and incites them to create the unexpected and new.
I am interested in cultivating our human ability to fantasize, to freely associate, put together and create. Imagination is a very powerful human ability – it cannot be controlled, is free of censorship, manipulation and logical and ethical prohibition. Imagination is the power of subjectivity that surpasses reality. I believe to imagine is for each person a liberating sensation for it is the ability to select freely from the real world.
Next: a focus on the artist's individual works, processes, and the concept of viewer participation. Or read the introductory conversation with Loefke.
Paul Black - Paul Black is an artist and art journalist, living and working in the UK. Born: 1971, Oxford, UK. Works: Oxford, London UK, New ...
