And What Comes Back

Mitzi Pederson

Unosunove Gallery

November 24, 2010 - January 22, 2011

www.unosunove.com

By Monet McCord

Located on a small road and being the only building with glass doors allowing the viewer to see inside, Galleria 1/9 UnoSuNove is the current home of the exhibition, And What Comes Back; this is actually the gallery’s first solo exhibition in Italy of American artist Mitzi Pederson.  Mitzi Pederson currently lives and works in Berlin.  She has been interested in allowing materials she uses to determine their own form and to share in the creation of the work.  She tries to create interplay with materials- they respond to her actions and she responds to their actions with intuition and minimized intention.  The new work in the show, And What Comes Back, consists of manipulated photographs, silk paper, and wood.

As the spectator stands outside of the door waiting for, Monica de Sario, the gallerist to buzz you into the gallery, the viewer can see what appear to be random pieces of wood on the floor.  Once you enter the gallery you see that they are indeed the art pieces of Mitzi Pederson.  The gallery consists of three different rooms in which the artist’s works are displayed.   None of the works in the gallery are titles nor have a description of what they are.  The materials of the works in the first room are manipulated photographs, silk paper and wood, the second room only of manipulated photographs and wood, and the third room solely manipulated photographs and silk paper.  Not only are the amounts of materials in a work decreasing but also so is the number of works in each room.   It is as if Mitzi Pederson was hinting at the possibility of the effects of the materials that she used in her exhibit; they all could potentially begin to deteriorate.  For example, the strips of wood, a material that can be quite sensitive and reactive to its surroundings, at least atmospherically decrease in the works as you move through the gallery. 

Once in the second room, the large work in the corner presents itself as thin floating strips of wood intersecting one another but once the viewer is close enough they can see the very thin thread that is holding them in place.  This positioning of wood is somewhat interesting because one would not think that thin thread can hold wood in the air, but the manipulation of the size and thickness of the wood allows for this to be possible.  Mitzi Pederson is reducing her control over the precision of placement and providing room for change, to see how the piece may or may not develop on its own over time.

The third and last room in the gallery is the office space of the gallery, with a desk, computer, and other works by other artists, which takes your attention away from the final pieces in Mitzi Pederson’s exhibition.  The last works presented in this room are photographs that have been changed in someway by the artist.  She either peels off layers of the film, add glue and glitter to them, or cut them in a very odd and peculiar fashion.  The photos are then placed on silk paper and hung on the wall.  These photographs are in color and no specific image can be seen in the photos, but as informed by the gallerist, the photos are taken by the artist and are of her previous works.   Mitzi Pederson is again interacting with the materials but also allowing them to respond back to her.  I am sure that no one particular art piece is more important than the next, but the organization of this gallery lends the idea that the more important works are in the first two rooms, where the focus of the gallery is Mitzi Pederson and not other artist.  This exhibition is the first that I have been to that is really abstract and absent of any type of form and structure.  Most contemporary that I have seen, I can identify the object that is being presented, but here there is not an everyday object that can be identified.  It is the materials that can be identified in this exhibition.  Contemporary art is about questioning the traditional and creating new forms and ways to express the ideas of the artist while allowing the spectator to participate in the art; Mitzi Pederson makes this possible with her current exhibition And What Comes Back.