Cover

Publisher Note

Different surfaces collide in a strangely unfamiliar way; their collision raises goose bumps. These shaggy drawings! Pleasantly scratchy, they present themselves to the viewer and offer structure as well as resistance. Next to them are these surfaces one can' t quite get a grip on. They are too perfect, and free of any trace. Immediately one "slides off" of them, as if slipping on ice or a soapy mirror surface.
While her drawings deal intensively with urban space as an environment, Teresa Mayr's booklet "horsetails" creates a completely new kind of space that succeeds in uniting the seemingly contradictory. This new setting enables the drawings to soften up their thematic framework and let themselves drift. Formally, the scanned pencil and marker drawings are supplemented by digital forms and planes. Contentwise, images of a physical urban environment are overlaid with quotations of images from the digital world. In this fragmentary mixture, everything becomes blurred; sometimes flocculation occurs. Only the booklet as such provides cohesion. With its linear reading path from front to back, it attempts to create an order that must, however, correspond with the associative non-order of the virtual. This tension is maintained throughout.
The pages contain very personal mental images. Some passages feel like a cheerful picture book, put together fluidly and intuitively. House with apple tree; rainbow over delicate greenery. Furry apricots, dolphin stickers, a bunny. Foaming, splashing, trickling; erotic allusions. Elsewhere, things are turning into irritating scenarios: Treatment chairs with unexplained functions; unsettling apparatuses. Rapunzel's braid has been cut off; snakes wriggle out of bodies; the bitten apple. And again and again, volcanic eruptions. Occasionally, writings and comments mingle with the images and establish a hermetic symbolism. Knowledge of symbols can deepen the (picture) reading yet does not necessarily lead to a complete deciphering. Thus, the booklet can be read anew from the beginning over and over again.

Text: Miriam Albert

Artists’ Book

horsetails (Pferdeschwänze)

by Teresa Mayr

Publisher
Release Date April 2022
Credits
Artist: Teresa Mayr
Printrun 100
Availability Available
Dimensions 20.0 × 28.0 cm
Pages 40