The artist lecture and exhibition opening by Karley Klopfenstein and Anja Marais was one of the most abstract and beautiful presentations ever given on a series of artwork. The dual exhibition showcased the work of Anja Marais who is an artist from South Africa who works with sculpture and the theme of storytelling and life passages in her work. Although she currently resides and works in Florida, Marais has artwork and publications all over the country. As her biography states, “ Through an ancestral portal she examines the fragility of life by creating biosphere content that touches on themes of cyclical elements of fauna and flora, memories, genetics and life-death.” This is very true with Marais’ work that she presented in the exhibition, with sculptures of the human head and torso attached to strings and other fabric materials. One specific sculpture showed a man’s head upside down, attached at the neck by a tied rope hung off the ceiling. The sculpture is hand sewn and Marais explained how she sews on each small portion of fabric to make the surface of the sculpture actually resemble that of the human skin. This, as well as glass eyes bought from a taxidermist make the sculpture resemble the human forms of life and death; it’s on the edge of reality but also on the verge of unreal. When I spoke to Marais, she actually said that this was something she was trying to get across in her artwork. Behind this particular piece was a collage of the different pieces of numbered fabric, pasted onto a sheer cloth with hints of blue water-like shapes. When you stand back and look at the work, it looks like a person submerging themselves into the water; its abstraction and beauty really do contradict each other, but give it almost a sort of nostalgic feeling. Karley Klopfenstein is also an artist from Southern Florida who has showcased her work broadly in the U.S. With Klopfenstein’s work, she focuses on an American military weaponry style sculptures; coupled with the cultural traditional factors of the area those weapons are used in. For example, one of Klopfenstein’s main works is a “fat man” bomb; a bomb specifically used by the U.S. on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. With this, she covered the exterior of a wooden “fat man” bomb in a latch-hooked cloth, with traditional Afghani and Iraqi symbols and motif’s. Klopfenstein also takes this same idea and applied it to an almost life size version of a military war tank; still covered with the traditional symbols of the country these machines are in, but this time In rug material. Each of these objects reminds us of all the violence and destruction that’s present everyday. Another particular work that she presented in the exhibition was her life-size AK-47 macramé gun. To actually see the gun life-size was pretty scary because it really is bigger than most of us; and to see it as a flimsy, cloth object-not capable of destruction is also interesting. By covering the objects and making them out of different materials, especially cloth which is a particular feminine and soft item, Klopfenstein makes the viewer aware of the potential and meaning that these militarized objects have.
Overall I really enjoyed the exhibition; I really feel that both artists’ works’ showed a broad sense of abstraction and unique creativity. From decorated military tanks to taxidermist life size human models, both artists’s decided to title the show “tenterhooks” which I found really neat due to the fact that tenterhooks were used to hold and construct woolen fabrics, which is essentially what both artists are doing in their works. Both Anja Marais and Karley Klopfenstein are two artists that clearly represent memory and place as well as the human form and mind.
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