Sheila Rotner
installation/multimedia exhibit
with Ana Stella
Becoming/Unbecoming
Formandose/Deformandose
INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK
This project was presented at Touchstone Gallery, Washington DC, in November-December, 1997, and at the Shenandoah Valley Art Center Inc., in Waynesboro, Virginia in November 1999. In both places elements were used to encourage people to experience the nature of the space - one a gallery, the other a house that had become a gallery - and to create a focus and a path, a flow. Elements included a video of the Potomac river, "Throat", (which at Touchstone Gallery was housed in an alcove and viewed through a peep hole cut into the throat of the framed portrait of a renaissance woman, and at the Shenandoah Valley Art Center the video was projected into a darkened room onto four panels of mesh, as well as being viewed through the peep hole); a pile of volcanic rocks from Hawaii; a title sculpture made out of plexiglas and wood posts; our paintings hanging like clothes on a clothesline in the breeze; a mirror cut on the diagonal and cornered to open up a view, etc. Because we were both trained as architects, it was natural for us to think in abstract terms about the use and meaning of space, and to work with different materials and media around a concept imagining the process of change and the way in which one thing can become another.
Installation views, Waynesboro show, 1999
Rotner/Stella installation....................Rotner/Stella installation
Rotner installation..........................................................Stella installation
a tour of the exhibit
works by Sheila Rotner
works by Ana Stella
