ON GOING
Michaela Zimmer
13 October – 24 November 2022
Platform-A Gallery
Middlesbrough Railway Station
Zetland Road, Middlesbrough TS1 1EG
Michaela Zimmer – ON GOING
In the UK
and the US, full-body suits are back in fashion: cosy and colourful as pyjamas
or house suit. Featuring rounded ears or a stubby tail, the onesie then looks
like a domesticated form of Heracles’ coat of the Nemean lion, which made its
wearer almost invulnerable. Slipping into someone else’s skin has always proved
advantageous to humans, be it from cows or crocodiles. Conversely, few
Christian depictions of saints are as gruesome as that of Bartholomew, whose
martyrdom consisted of being flayed. In murals and sculptures, he wears his
skin over his arm like a limp, empty onesie.
Empty overalls
also lie on the floor in Michaela Zimmer's exhibition ON GOING, some hanging on
welding rods as if waiting for their next assignment. How that might look like
is shown in a sequence of images that runs in a loop on a screen: three figures
dressed in Zimmer's full-body suits roam the eerily beautiful industrial
dystopia of Middlesbrough and its surroundings. Their faces averted or obscured
by hair, they appear isolated and stern. Their suits become an incorporate
uniform.
These
onesies are not made of colourful plush: assembled pieces of shiny black cloth,
as if covered with oil, grey painted canvas and white disposable protective
suits made of polypropylene seem to shield their wearers from an inhospitable
outside world in which the human body needs more than the strength of a lion—rather the constitution of soldiers: Each of her suits is still based on
the cutting pattern of a British Army boilersuit, that Michaela Zimmer took
apart some twenty years ago.
From the
beginning up until now, the overalls are closely connected to the movement of
the human body — a theme that has long pervaded Michaela Zimmer's art. The
works 220605 and 220604 shown in the exhibition seek to make
something as ubiquitous as the movements of our bodies perceptible. Michaela
Zimmer approaches this phenomenon with the help of an annotation system inspired
by choreographic notations recording the reverberation following movement
repetition during her daily run. From the resulting archive of a movement vocabulary,
she has transferred the memorised curves, lines, and dots larger than life onto
Lacktex Oil Cloth using acrylic spray. Michaela Zimmer abstracts the physical
intuition of movement into a filigree visual immediacy that connects with the beholders’
through their mirrored black image.
With these
works, Michaela Zimmer's own powerful jogging movements become a stimulus for
the boilersuit-wearing performers. If you look closely, her movements are to be
found everywhere in the exhibition: they are present in the material of the
disposable coveralls worn and spray-painted in previous performances, as much
as in the grey or gesturally blue painted canvases, now enclosing other people’s
arms and necks as parts of the coveralls. Zimmer's own energy finds a transfer
in this: the impasto layers of paint and the synthetic textiles promise
protection and strength, but they also trail behind the wearers in a train of
stretcher bars partly covered with canvas. To set this material from her past
in motion too Michaela Zimmer equips it with heavy duty caster wheels. But
movement proves difficult for the canvas frame: the asphalt of the industrial landscape
is not its natural habitat.
Stretcher
frames and wheels, movement and liminality, dance, and boilersuits: in ON
GOING, materials and techniques from Michaela Zimmer's long artistic career in
Great Britain and Berlin come together. Like a remix, the works inscribe
themselves into each other, develop each other further and open up trains of
thought: how does movement coming from within us influence the full-body suit made
out of skin, fabric, space and environment that surrounds us every day?
Anika
Reineke, Nov 2022