Schiller - Marginalia

2007

Found pages from works by German romantic poet Friedrich von Schiller, rubber latex, graphite, charcoal on rice paper, 74 x 120 inches. Courtesy Galerie Samuel Lallouz, Montréal

Exhibited:

Monika Weiss - Marginalia, Galerie Samuel Lallouz, Montréal, 2008

ARTIST STATMENT

Schiller-Marginalia is a large-scale work on paper that can be viewed on the wall or placed horizontally on an elevation. There is no top or bottom nor left or right; the drawing is circular, inviting the viewers to consider its surface as a fragment of a larger textual landscape.

Since 2005 I have been working with found books by German authors published in Germany before 1945. This date marks not only the end of Second World War but also, the transition from old font to new contemporary German font used by publishing houses after 1945. In my installations the books are lying on the floor, open. I lie down on this bedding of open books and draw lines and stains around my body, with my eyes closed, such as in Phlegethon-Milczenie (2005-). The books become marked with another layer of meaning and a different form of embodied, blind reading. In the related cycle of works on paper, I draw the body onto the pages, mapping and marking German literature - considered by the Nazi regime the “high culture” - with the symbolic stains of historical trauma represented here by the larger then life body, lying outstretched, gendered, vulnerable and anonymous, yet also mine and yours.

Monika Weiss

Essay Excerpt

Born and educated in Poland, New York City based artist Monika Weiss steadfastly pursues representation of the body through mixed media. This endeavor comes to the for in her latest Montréal exhibition, Marginalia. Its enigmatic figures create a dialectical tension, a mystical vein akin to the concept of “aura” articulated by German cultural critic, Walter Benjamin.

Norman F. Cornett, PhD, Monika Weiss, Marginalia, esse arts + opinions, n. 66, Disparition-Disappearance, 2009