MASA

“Things that due to their permanent presence in everyday life appear negligible, become almost invisible. Foundation of Isabel Schmiga’s artistic engagement are shifts in context of insignificant elements from familiar situations. So far, the artist concentrates on transitions, idiosyncrasies of her everyday surroundings, collisions of seemingly irreconcilable opposites, substances and their emblematic qualities, the form, the word.
The rhetoric of the material, the multilingualism of familiar things and symbols, and the relationship of body and space contour the artist’s view in a double sense: they are literally motivation and motive of her enterprise of engaging with the ambiguity of familiar signs, thereby bringing to the surface firmly inscribed, hidden potentials of meaning:
For example, the board game Ludo became visible in the Swiss national flag (MENSCH ÄRGERE DICH NICHT, 2003), Robidogbags (bags for the disposal of dog excrements in public spaces) turned into a disposed fur of a greyhound that ran away (GREYHOUND, 2005).”

Isabel Schmiga, born in 1971, currently lives and works in Paris. Studies at the Academy for Fine Arts Braunschweig (MFA), studies in Art History at Basel University. Several scholarships and residencies, among them DAAD for Switzerland, Basel, iaab for Platform Garanti, Istanbul in 2006 and iaab for Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris in 2008. To get more information about her work, please go to: www.schmiga.de.

http://artforum.com/archive/id=19892