//ChristianePeschek
(*1984 in Salzburg) works at the interface between post-photography, post-internet, text and painting, between analog processes and digital/virtual transformation. The focus of her work lies in the confrontation with physical touch and and emotional coding through an increase of virtualisation, as well as the exhaustion of intimacy and corporeality. The primarily installative works were most recently shown at FOTOGALERIE Wien, Kunstraum Nestroyhof, UNSEEN Amsterdam, Salzburger Kunstverein, Benaki Museum Athens and Photon Gallery Ljubljana. She is currently offline based in Vienna.
OF EGO
“Notes from Paradise”
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Her piece is an exploration of mental abysses and the decay of idealized images in the post-digital age.
In the context of a “romantic reality”, the work builds a tension between expectations and disa-ppointments, emotionality and the photographic surface. The quest for aesthetic perfection was already a central aspect of the Greek worldview in the antique, which can be rediscovered in virtualized form in a post-internet society.
This phenomenon of the idealization of body and environment also experiences the construction of love, whose endeavor is not reality but idealization. The decay, the breaking of that constructed utopia, a mental state of the infernal machine, should mark the end of a relationship between ideal and reality.
During the SENTIMENTAL DEFENSE artist retreat, she collaborated with the local perfume museum in Cassis and started working on her own essence of a passed relationship scent. Referring to the myth of echo, she created a scent, applied at the center of this publication, captured in a human tear drop. One precious drop of this essence will be enough to recall, generate and mark a eeting memory or fugitive experience. She refers to the smell of a former intimate emotional connection, transforming human traces into a post-physicality. Once again the observer needs to get in close contact, in that case with the book, in order to explore the ephemeral moment of something almost impossible to capture: the unity of 2 bodies and their perpetual echoing memory.
"Liquid Desert"
LIQUID DESERT consists of photographic structure studies, site specific installations and micro sculptures. Main focus in my work is the virtualisation and musealisation of landscape. Partly in cooperation with the Natural History Museum ‘Haus der Natur’ in Salzburg and partly shot in the Chilean Atacama Desert, I work around the construction of nature and the fluid borders of a contemporary landscape definition.
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I am interested in the perception and construction of a far-away landscape from a distanced position. The Atacama Desert as one of the most contrary landscapes to a central european perspective therefor caught my interest. I choose to work with PVC and vinyl foam to create artificial stones and landscape structures. The foam is a material that is used in museums to create “fake” landscapes, preferable stones and rock structures. Using a museum material to talk about the musealisation of landscape I found as a suitable consequence in my approach. Also its materiality is furthest away from any natural source which highlights the contrast between natural and constructed structures.
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I placed artificial stones in between natural desert environment to achieve a merge of the real. The virtualisation of a reality, may it be a constructed or an original one, that happens through the process of taking a digital image, replaces the object’s reality to a new structural existence. Merging constructed and real captures of stones and desert structures, mixing photography with objects, I forced to create a series of hybrid landscapes.
