Milwaukee, WI – The Green Gallery is pleased to present talktalktalk a two person exhibition by Zurich based artist Tobias Madison and Berlin based artist Kaspar Müller.
talktalktalk is essentially about communication; the process of exchange between two artists, and the impossibility of exchange between works of art.
The gallery space is ostentatiously filled with Tobias Madison's globular, hollow, paper mache lanterns made of industrial paper towels suspended from the ceiling. Though the lanterns appear to have a significant physical presence they are vacuous sculptures. The lanterns animate the space with their simulated weight; filling a void without actually filling it. Within the space the emptiness is filled again, redoubled, with the soundtracks of two videos: For Ever Alone and Around the World by Müller and Madison's Batman Digital Justice.
These sounds are mixed with a collaborative piece that uses recorded drum beats in 4/4 pulse produced by Müller inside two of Madison's lanterns. The overlapping sounds and empty objects are meant to bring into focus the process of animation or the process of giving voice to dead material.
For Ever Alone and Around the World by Müller presents an animation of a hat which was first used as a costume worn by an actor in an earlier film project by Müller entitled, Colmar & Strasbourg(2010). After an extension of the Colmar & Strasbourg project, called I was in Trinidad and learned a lot, originally shown at Francesca Pia, it is now the hat itself that becomes the narrator as a animated object. The hat is monologuing about his state as an object in the process of reception, and looks back from his point of view of what "happened so far."
Batman Digital Justice (2011) a digital video of a comic book that Madison sent out panel by panel to friends who then recorded their voices as their respective character. The comic book speech bubbles turning into subtitles for various voices. “Digital Justice” refers to the first digitally drawn comic book. Madison's video, with equal amounts of naivety and paranoia, dramatizes the communication technology that allowed for the production of the work.
On a wall of the gallery Müller's AA drawings are a reedition of an older work. Twenty-five Xerox copies of a 2009 Müller drawing are drawn over again - (re)creating each as a unique piece. The drawings sketch the phonetic pronunciation of the letter “a” in different variations.
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Tobias Madison (B. 1985) has had recent solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zurich, Karma International and Kunstverein Munich with selected group exhibitions at The Powerstation, Guggenheim Bilbao, Arnolfini, Kunsthalle Bern and Kunsthaus Zurich.
Kaspar Müller (B. 1983) has had solo exhibitions at Gasconade, Milan, Circuit, Centre d’art contemporain Lausanne, Societe Berlin and upcoming solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern with selected group exhibitions at GAMEC, Bergamo, Galerie Francesca Pia and HEAD Geneva.