An Insufficiency in Our Screens, Mills College Museum of Art, Oakland, CA

Thomas Trummer, Curator:

Schulz, who is very language oriented—as the poetic titles of her works demonstrate—calls this weaving of the ordinary with the extraordinary, and the stage of its setting, a “screen.” However, there is no definite thread running through any of these idiosyncratic stories. Instead, she prefers to provoke the viewer’s participation to complete her tale. The beholder is attracted, mesmerized, even absorbed by her miniscule designs, and feeling the need to become involved, ends up imagining himself a protagonist. To underline these disquieting effects, Schulz usually works with juxtapositions of size. Tiny figures and attributes are contrasted to enlarged, strained spaces, so visual perception shifts into virtual projection. Intensifying the surreal encounters, Schulz stretches the spaces; the drawn zones grow out from their dislocated centers, extending to all sides as if on the verge of a transcendent occupation of all within their reach. Irrespectively, an essential residue remains. It is the void of the untouched paper, surplus being as unavoidable in drawing as in life.

As the setting and the poetic references are stretched, so is the support. Schulz not only bends her scenes, but also the actual paper. Spatial imagery pops up from the flat surface. It was the German philosopher Leibniz who first discovered that it was possible to calculate bent geometric forms. Gilles Deleuze, whom Schulz admires, also followed his ideas, concluding that there is no safe standpoint, no indicator that distinctively separates solid ground and pure illusion, conscious and subconscious, the center and the offside of the scenes—as it were, the scene and the ob-scene. In fact, all these distinctions can be presumed to be guides that heuristically force the viewer to inner reflexivity. This precarious process of self-perception is basically what Schulz intends to unleash: The search for the miraculous within the beholder. Seeing two sides of the folded paper, viewers also discover another side of themselves.

Charlotte Schulz

Charlotte Schulz