Lisa Birke

KEIN HEIM IN SICHT _ GLEICHGEWICHT

The show KEIN HEIM IN SICHT _ GLEICHGEWICHT is a confrontation of two contemporary art positions out of the Canadian prairie, Heather Benning a classical sculptor with a contemporary approach in media and model and Lisa Birke performance and video artist.
Both artists are dealing with daily topics and fears even though they are using totally different genres.

"All Safety Gone" by Heather Benning refers to John Steinbeck´s East of Eden, a novel about precarious economic situations and family troubles. While Benning was reading this in Scotland, during completing her MFA in Edinburg, she created the three sculptures which are direct referenced to that novel too.
The Gods Have Fallen, the girl standing on whitewashed pallets
Everything is Only for a Day - the boy with a rabbit
Descended of the Restless - black dog chasing his tail
The work was created between 2008 and 2009, during the economic crisis and the following collapse. The personally experience was also influencing the creation of the figures. The common feeling of pulling the ground under our feet and the fear of a uncertain future affects the artistic procedure as well.

While Heather Bennig is more searching for a calm approach, poetic and contemplative Lisa Birke rushes full of power and energy through daily moments and special universes blowing every unfitting thing up.

For her new project "The Knits" she is straddling a liminal filmic space between performance for video and contemporary fairy tale. This project is a loving homage to Barbara Birke (the artist’s mother) and her chronic affliction of “The Knits”. In knitting, one literally gives one’s time—chronicled in interwoven loops of yarn—to keep someone warm. Hand-knitted sweaters bring us closer to our mothers and grandmothers as we physically carry a document of their love and labour next to our skin, almost like a protective second skin.
"The Knits" simultaneously knits and unravels the threads of a familial relationship stretching from Vancouver Island, British Colombia to Kitchener, Ontario Canada. Along the way, the work tugs at the interwoven loops of art versus craft, gendered materiality and the nostalgic artifacts of technologies.