Playing with Fire: A Conversation with Ariel Schlesinger

Adam Carr, collecteurs, April 1, 2020
Adam Carr (AC): Your work is a risk and often at risk. It engenders issues of health and safety, and they cause potential threats to the viewer. There is a constant foreboding sense of danger in many of your pieces, yet they also speak about religion, meditation even. The work presented in ‘1-31’, on appearance, looks as though it tells a different story though…
 
Ariel Schlesinger (AS): True, a lot of my work holds some sense of danger because I am interested in the tangible and fragile verge of collapse. I am interested in processes of transformation. Sometimes transformation can be sad, violent but also subtle and beautiful. The thing is, every once in a while, I try to break out of some predetermined course of making, as if I need to reinvent my process and try to come up with a completely different approach, only to discover the next step was so connected to the previous one. I study how matter behaves, and how things work in a particular way. I disrupt matters and functionality to create another causality, create another possibility – hidden if you like – and many times I create the impossible behavior through the use of poetics. In the works presented here, as present in others, I was trying to produce a closed circuit, some sort of sense of wholeness using two of the same objects. Sometimes, this can be a minimum intervention, like in this work. Two keys with inverted groves make a whole.
 
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