Srephan Schulz & Reuben Breslar

July / August 2007

Stephan Schulz (Germany)

German artist living and working in Montreal, Canada, Stephan Schulz uses precision to get around the rules. It allows his performances to enter the lives of viewers in the minute spaces they make available – in the in-between spaces of travel. In the performance, Exercise Machine, Schulz establishes a temporary relationship between a site and the public occupying it, by encouraging dialogue and by fostering the experience of passersby. You can imagine Schulz as the tinkering kid who took apart all his toys to find out how their hidden mechanisms worked inside. He might also have been the kid who asked “why” over and over about daily social rituals– at an age where we still reside outside the structures and rules and timetables we learn to live by later in life. Now he uses electronic media and public interventions as a language to communicate his perception of the world. As he makes motors whirr and lights flicker with his body, heads turn and all of a sudden people are really present. Schulz’s work involves re-purposing consumer contraptions and reclaiming city property as public material. He is interested in engaging with and inserting his voice into the activities of passersby instead of building up a static audience of bystanders in his performances and installations. In this way, he breaks into and stretches fleeting moments we allot to experiencing unexpected events in our surroundings while we rush from A to B constantly and instantaneously categorizing every stimulus we encounter to death. Conducted by taking over the sidewalk outside of the Goethe Institute in Chinatown, Dupont Circle and replayed in real-time within the space of the gallery, Schulz’s performance reoccurs – first energizing public space and then breaking open the confines of the gallery.

Reuben Breslar (Washington, DC)

Reuben Breslar’s / Project is an intersection between his works in “memory drawing” and his interest in pushing the boundaries of the gallery space through interactive, performative events. If his drawings investigate frenetic abstract geometries, the installation flings its lines across the gallery walls and ceiling, lending a cavorting movement to the piece that transcends the architecture that contains it. Aspects of transformation are at play at the core of Breslar’s practice, and in this piece in particular. This is where a palpable concern for human awareness and human interaction comes through in his work. In the form of translation, two dimensions are made into three and one material becomes another. The traversing and doubling back of the tape energizes the white cube, transporting the viewer beyond its limits and expectations into another world. The way Breslar draws – or tapes - this other world, these Pynchonesque networks in which we are entangled is what is exciting here. In this installation, time and space are collapsed on the gallery walls and we find ourselves standing at the beginning and the end at once. Maybe from here we can catch a glimpse of each other.