Esther Teichmann — In Search of Lightning — Les filles du calvaire Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 29 → November 28, 2015

Teichmann’s practice combines still and moving image, collage and painting to create alternate worlds, which blur autobiography and fiction. Central to the work lies an exploration of the origins of fantasy and desire and how these are bound to experiences of loss and representation. Through a parallel display of photographs or films juxtaposed with fictional sets and women bodies, thousands of stories emerge.

Fractal Scars, Salt Water and Tears invites us into a liquid dream—like world of desire. Cascading waterfalls and seashells whispering the lapping of waves are juxtaposed with state who seem to be stepping out of the stone from which they are carved.

A larg—scale backdrop of a cave is painted in dripping inks. Languid female nudes punctuate mythical landscapes, auto—erotic in their gaze and gesture, eyes turned away or averted to storm clouds above them. A pregnant woman lies under a night sky with a child lying between her thighs, another rests on her elbow, back turned, swallowed by the darkness of the boat—bed she is lying upon. Sisters, friends, lovers, strangers, these women of flesh and stone tell us of pleasure and longing.

Through the layering of memory, desire, fear, fiction and fantasy, Teichmann uses and extends the photographic medium as a passage between realms of experience and artistic creation. Her work exploits the tension between photography’s relationship to reality and sense of otherworldly power. This complex, even troubled relationship with the medium has yielded a passionate foray into others.¹

Across these different mediums, we move from real to imagined spaces, exploring the relationship between loss, desire and the imaginary. The photographic medium is worked upon with painting, collage and montage, narrative voice over juxtaposed with moving image. Here, the photographic is loosened from its referent, slipping in and out of darkness, cloaked in inks and bathed in subtle hues of tinted light. These inhabited spaces are often spaces of night. Womb-like, liquid, they are moving from beds to swamps from the mother to the lover in search of a primordial return.

¹ Excerpt from «The Photograph as Portal», Jessica Brier’s essay (exhibition curator and writer based in San Francisco). Published on Daylight Digital feature — March 2014