“It is how the familiar and the unknown touch each other that makes things interesting.” (Bruce Nauman)
After the success of last year’s striking ‘camionette presentation’ at Schmuck 2009, artist Willy Van de Velde will continue and broaden the concept during Schmuck 2010. Presenting this time considerable smaller scale jewellery pieces, like rings and bracelets. All reflecting his characteristic ‘futuristic’ and colourful style, using recuperated materials like plexiglass and aluminium. Jewellery and wearable objects distinguish in fact only one section of the universe of self-made multimedia artist Van de Velde, in which lightcreations and soundscapes are evenly present. A universe contemplating on technology and computers and their present-day omnipresence. Thus, his creations could be seen as ‘conversation pieces’, stimulating reflection and external dialogues. Evelien Bracke
"A lot of it would be called nothing - a thing or an object or any word you want to give it." (Eva Hesse)
The most recent series of jewellery artist Silke Fleischer embraces the everyday object as a precious thing. In ‘Pickups’ and ‘Fittings’ she focuses and zooms in on our relation with mass-produced objects, usually lacking our attention, but intrinsically sharing a hidden and purposeful design. A lot of these ‘things’ do not even have a name, exemplary for their daily ‘invisibility’. By picking them up and de-contextualizing them, Fleischer is redefining these ‘objects’ to ‘things’ (referring to Martin Heidegger on ‘things’: a thing is an object we appropriate and link closely to our personal life). What she creates is above all a ‘rendez-vous’, a fortuitous encounter with a thing that was plucked from its habitual context and promoted to another status. Evelien Bracke