My Bed is Made of Atoms

Nicola Ginzel

October 10 - November 22, 2015

Press: Artcritical

Nicola Ginzel presents a multiplicity of compact bundles of power that come from her hands only when hot. She categorizes these intuitions as “Elements” and “Fragments” both of which are assembled from meaningfully charged personal objects selected in daily experience, the difference being "Elements" are worked to abstraction becoming essence whereas "Fragments" retain referents that are sometimes cultural, sometimes natural, sometimes both.

In one piece, dirt from the infamous music-recording mecca, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, is mixed with mug wart, rose petals, and remnants of used clothing. Another piece quarters the perfect image of feminine adolescence represented on the top of a refined Viennese Demel chocolate box. There are assembled bits of bright orange towel and stucco wall found in Puerto Rico and from Cuba, respectively, and the velvety remains of a stuffed animal. A mango seed with traced florescent veins, a crushed cigarette box tailored in blue mesh, a twig, some snakeskin, kneecaps made from obscured objects, some are dusted gold.

Each work a lovingly considered miniature scaled to the hand, each a meditative innovation that evokes mantras or something tantric: the quotidian rendered sacred, the personal offered as universal, ephemera made concrete, broken bodies repaired with intention.

My Bed is Made of Atoms has work chosen from fifteen years of Ginzel's intensive engagement transforming materials, with an emphasis on recent works chosen specifically to dialogue with Cathouse FUNeral’s ever evolving space.

From the artist: I want to illuminate the spaces between mainstream culture by emphasizing the mundane and commonplace. I hope the work conveys... that it is in simplicity and interaction where the essence of life’s breath resides, not in the end result or goal achieved.