Editor’s note: Coco Picard spoke with artist vanessa german about her new solo exhibition, “At the end of this reality there is a bridge—the bridge is inside of you but not inside of your body. Take this bridge to get to the next _______, all of your friends are there; death is not real and we are all dj’s.,” on view at the Logan Center Gallery. Edited text from the comic is transcribed here to ease readability.
During her Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry fellowship, Pittsburgh/Asheville-based artist vanessa german led an experimental seminar at the University of Chicago. With a curriculum designed around the concept of “paraacademia,” german’s course prioritizes esoteric knowledge (magic, the occult, fairy tales, etc.) traditionally overlooked by higher education. Born from those discussions, artworks in her resulting solo exhibit record and reflect the “entangled energetic signature of the class,” and are conceived to transport viewers into a similar space of vulnerability, curiosity, and courage. This for german is the technological capacity of art, a capacity engineered by the artist whom she views as a “complete technology of beingness.” In the following interview, german discusses some of these processes. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
vanessa german: “I think about most of the small clay objects as artifacts that have kernels of power inside of them, because those forms come through awareness, like what it is to be aware of being aware. So how does one interact with an artifact that is a technological device of that power of awareness? The objects hold and share the energetic imprint of that frequency with anyone in proximity.
“What is it to sit together? To bring a place of focus and awareness into a sitting? . . . We would envision other cultures sitting around fire or a body of water and being in oneness with the source energy of those places. . . . It really is far outside the limiting presence of what has been defined as the fertile field of knowledge and wisdom-gaining.
“I think consciousness as the complete animation of source energy. I find that when ChatGPT came out and people starting posing a whole bunch of questions to AI and really engaging in a kind of flirty back-and-forth with this technology—one of things I kept thinking was, ‘I just want to ask you that question.’ I’m curious if we spoke to each other with the same level of wild, outlandish, nonviolent, nonhostile curiosity, what stories would we find?”
“At the end of this reality there is a bridge—the bridge is inside of you but not inside of your body. Take this bridge to get to the next _______, all of your friends are there; death is not real and we are all dj’s.”
Through 12/15: Tue-Sun 9 AM–9 PM, Logan Center Gallery, 915 E. 60th Street, loganexhibitions.uchicago.edu/exhibitions/vanessa-german
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