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“Conversations With My Sister,” is a continually evolving work of art, rooted in the relationship and memories of siblings, Anna and Mark von Rosenstiel. Creative process is their conversation, exploring the idea of a shared history and the narrative around their experiences. Collecting stories and memories as siblings, Anna and Mark are each shaped and influenced by the continuous evolution of their relationship.
Growing up in a family with very close bonds, creativity was always deeply encouraged, and Anna and Mark are sometimes startled by the different paths they have explored away from one another, while continually looping back toward their relationship. At times, experiences they assumed to be deeply shared have been remembered in completely different ways, or adjusted due to differing perspectives.
What does it mean to have a shared familial container for memory? We often perceive shared memories as fully encapsulated truth and knowledge; but the vessels holding these memories are porous and ever expanding. Words, gestures and traditions that were assumed to be fully engrained fact, are actually different memories all together. In this way, the vessels holding each siblings memory vary and are unique to their experience.
Their desire to explore this space is an exercise in looking at their familial foundation. They also explore how someone that is deeply tied to our history can upend assumptions about who we think we are, expanding our relationship to each other and ourselves. The closeness Anna and Mark have shared over the years is a way for them to challenge each other, creating a line of narrative in an ever expanding vessel of their family history.
For this show, Anna and Mark used paintings that Mark created while at an artist residency in the San Juan Islands. First, they cut away sections of these paintings, creating small images from the larger scapes. In a way, they chose certain "words" from the entire "story" to use as the foundation for this body of work.
Anna took the scraps from Mark's paintings and pressed them into large slabs of clay. These slabs were then painted and wiped clean to leave the stark impression of Mark's work behind, creating a fossil (or memory) of the painting's existence. These clay panels are "memories" that will be hung as a collection, rebuilding and changing the narrative of the paintings, while also become their own narrative.
Throughout this show, Anna explores the idea of creating many smaller pieces of work, obsessively repeating in volume, and placing them together to recreate the story of the original paintings. Her use of a repeated objects to capture a memory is indicative of our obsession with documenting and collecting memories through photos and texts and conversations, wanting a narrative to preserve a story.
In this way, Anna and Mark's conversation through the creative process reveals and upends assumptions about their memories and transforms their current artistic practice. Each of them gathers and saves memory in a different way, but rooted from the same place. It reveals their creative bond and love, as well as their insecurities and neuroses. The full body of work explores the sensation of an absolute to their collective narrative (a piling dug deep into their history), and their awareness that their narrative is something always adrift in new meaning. It is an expanding and outward conversation.
Opening at Urbanite / April 4, 2025 6-9pm