Gabrielle Teschner on Why Being an Artist Is a Job You Can’t Lose | Sight Unseen
Image courtesy of Not Work Related
“I think that what I make are objects of contemplation. They are material things, but they are always a vehicle toward something or some thought outside of the material.”
Through the prism of technology and screens by which we so often encounter art and design these days, textures soften, dimension flattens, scale drifts out and detaches from its context. When I first saw the work of Gabrielle Teschner, I questioned the size and materiality of these geometric compositions awash in fluid, pulsing color. Later, learning of their mechanics felt like a small revelation: an a-ha moment that drew me closer, made me crave the luxury of touch, of closeness, of asking questions. As it turned out, Teschner is interested in this negotiation of expectation, disparity, and convergence. “An observable constant of my studio practice is to place two seemingly distant topics on rafts and watch them float closer to each other over the course of months and years,” reads a caption on the artist’s Instagram.
Teschner’s signature “Sculptures-That-Are-Flat” pieces are made of individually painted planes of muslin that are stitched together, then ironed. Their scale ranges from hand-held (called ‘Minutes’ and measuring around 7×10 inches) to environmental, monolithic (up to 16×14 feet). Employing the symbolic and physical language of architectural forms, spatial relationships, and, often, weather patterns, Teschner explores dichotomies, concepts of strength and softness, force and flow, and phenomena of perception, among other impulses and ‘attractions,’ as she calls them. All of these are a way of understanding and questioning what it is to be in the world — a vantage that has as much to do with being an artist as anything else. Teschner’s belief is that being an artist “should have nothing to do with having a studio to work in” and “isn’t a job you can lose.” For Teschner, who is based between Richmond, VA and San Francisco, this faithful relationship comes from regarding those ‘attractions’ that tap on her curiosity and invite deeper investigation as something rather sacred.
Teschner’s new show, titled “Forest for the Trees,” opened last month at Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, offering new work that explores mass and gravity rendered in fabric, while re-centering the oft-unknown polychromatic palette found in Greco-Roman antiquity. Days before its opening (the show is up through June 24), I connected with Teschner in a sprawling conversation about the nature of creativity, architecture as activity, disrupting her methodology, and much more.