Friday 21 October 2016

Andrea Heyer, The New Hippies with Flower Love Renewed Visions coming from Wien




© Haris Metaxa, All Rights Reserved, Reproduction Prohibited

Andrea Heyer, Hippie POP Artist Promising Happiness
(Paris, September 2016)

A herd of weird, queer looking animal sculptures suffering some sort of identity dysphoria, black with white faces in different sizes but nothing definite about their individual species.

Huge canvases, 2 meters high filled with what looks like flat plastic flowers with no stems, electric colours dancing around your eyes, you are off to a happy hippie acid dream and no artificial drug is needed, you float around weightless dreaming of an empty room to fill with this explosion of positive energy and flowery vibes.

Then comes a series of 15 medium sized black and white drawings on canvas, called „Friends“ where with her seductive simplicity Andrea Heyer depicts the variety and depth of feeling friends can inspire to us all. Because you can be rich or poor, successful or a romantic failure, make no mistake, you need friends, you need a private existence, you need intimacy to be fully human and the artist makes her priority to tell you so.

Then she declines a similar series in a smaller format called „Family“ and intersected with blown up family pictures in glossy colour, all in a delicate celebration and wonder of this basic link that makes us who we are, who shutters the myth of floating, unconnected singularities and places us all in a genealogy of people, of history and geography and in an emotional map too.

Andrea Heyer concentrates on the intimate feelings that connect us to each other and to the world, she strikes down isolation and solitude, invites human connection and promises potential fun and happiness in a bright, flowery universe where human and animal herds could live together in harmony.

She dreams in multicoloured flowers in our grey world but remains vigilant to the greyness lurking inside us too.

Come on peoples, dream with Andrea, bring the hippie humans back, yes, revisited by our fragmented postmodern sensitivities of course, but dare to dream and place your faith and actions to utopia.









ANDREA HEYER'S SITE : http://andreaheyer.net/

Margaret Atwood on BBC's Hard Talk on 17/10/16, Caring for the Environment and our Dignity, only Human Survival Option



We all know Canadian author Margaret Atwood,
have read her best-seller "The Hand-Maids Tale",
have followed her career and her rich production of ideas
in her books, cultural politics and interviews.

I happened to listen to her discussing her latest work
and thoughts about writing, the human condition,
the environment and our common duty as human beings
to protect Nature in every way possible and most of all
how important it is take care of our oceans before we pollute them so much
we compromise our own survival in such a way there will be no way back,
we shall be doomed at last and happily disappear as human
species thanks to our own distructive efforts finally turned against
ourselves as we have done againsts others, animals, minerals, food,
medicine, air, earth, water or fire...

We seem to be sitting on our heads instead of firmly standing on our feet,
we destroy what it is the most important to us, our bodies, our food,
our medicine, the environment that feeds and sustains us, the people
who we could love instead of entering in competition with.
Oh well, apocalypse now or later, Margaret Atwood remains optimistic
both about the human condition and the environment
and me with her.

Go listen her words on BBC's Hard Talk site (Link at the bottom)
and be inspired by her words and vision as I was and I am,
admire the multi-talented versatile expression and production of this author
who, among other things, has recently adapted Shakespeare's Tempest
and written an illuminating comic book for adults and children alike.
And oh, yes, before I forget, turn your back to yours screens and go
read a book, her book or any other.
Books are good for you unconditionally, with no health warning attached whatsoever...

Thank Goddess, Margaret talks and we listen (and read)!
Carefully, happily, creatively...



BBC HARD TALK :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/n3ct0c5f

Margaret Atwood's site: http://margaretatwood.ca/
Tempest re-visited: http://margaretatwood.ca/books/hag-seed/

Karine Jollet, "The garden's voice"






“The Garden’s Voice” is an installation in 6 parts

or variations  on the title theme 

by French artist Karine Jollet

This is also her first Swedish exhibition and we hope the first 

of many to come.

 

Karine Jollet is a soft-sculpture artist using white fabrics 
as her favorite medium.
“The Garden’s Voice” is presented for the first time in this format 
which was specifically conceived for Fiberspace Gallery.
The title is taken from a long poem by Haris Metaxa, “Possessed”
written in the context of the joint garden poetry and sculpture exhibition 
called “Bodies of Grace”
The two artists, poet and sculptor, produced and exhibited it
 for the first time 
in 2009 in a Parisian garden, nature being one of the muses.
This installation includes the poem itself, 
depicted in 15 suspended handkerchiefs in pearl embroidery (“Possessed”), 
a suspended human figure capturing the garden’s voice (“Medium”), 
two suspended feet with roots (“Dance”), 
a mini-installation of two sculptures combined, 
one of a tunic with lungs embroidered on it 
and the other of two feet firmly on the ground 
(“Embodiment” and “Marcher – Walker”), 
a reclining woman connected to a flower
 (“RĂªve de Fleur – Flower Power”
and a sculpture of a suspended human ear (“Hearing”).
All installation sculptures are different characters of the same play,
 they exist in this invisible dimension 
where cosmic vibrations are transmitted and received 
and where nature and human beings 
are perceived and represented as equal entities 
sharing the same Cosmic Matrix. 
Each group of sculptures and the whole installation 
as such bring to light a different aspect of this harmonic experience 
of being a part of the same Talking, Vibrating Cosmos.

Can you feel it ?


POSSESSED

The magic garden 
is a huge lung
beating to the rhythm of the universe,
quietly counting each second
leaving to my care
its transformation
in experience and expression.
Plants, birds, sun and silence,
all the ingredients are there
for the transformation
to take place.
So now I open my mouth
but it is the garden’s voice that speaks
through me.

(c)Original poem in English by Haris Metaxa

FIND OUT MORE

Karine Jollet, The Garden's Voice, October 10 to 29, 2016
Fiberspace Gallery
Katarina Bangata 40
116 39 Stockholm
Sweden

http://fiberspace.se/exhibition/karine-jollet/