Heavy the Sea

Solo Museum show
Transformer Station
Cleveland Jan - April 2017

Immersive installations take the audience into an alternate orphic world, moving from beds to swamps and caves, in search of a primordial return. Here, the photographic is loosened from its referent, slipping in and out of darkness, cloaked in dripping inks, bathed in subtle hues, evoking a liquid space of night.

Narratives of loss and desire are entangled like the glistening tentacles wrapped around the artist’s body. Like the coral of the Red Sea said to be formed by Medusa’s blood spilled upon seaweed, Teichmann’s work transforms one thing into another, sliding between autobiography, fiction and myth, still and moving image, sculpture and painting.

Esther Teichmann’s photographs, films and writings, picture mothers like caves, sisters like seashells, lovers like moons, tears like waterfalls. Entering the octopus darkness of Teichmann’s caverns we find ingestion and emission, mother and daughter, sister and sister, black and white, lover and lover, surrealism’s erotic jolt: the irritant that makes the pearl. Seashells with apertures like cameras. The womb as oceanic. Lovers as moons. Holding as withholding. Day as night.

A zine published by Transformer Station, designed by the artist and Studio Hato, combines short stories and images by the artist with poems written in response to the work by artist-historian and writer Carol Mavor.

Esther collaborated with the composer Deirdre Gribbin for Fulmine, a multi-screen film installation. Gribbin’s string quartet score will be performed live on certain days throughout the exhibition period.

Founded in 2013, Transformer Station is a contemporary art museum located in Cleveland that presents the work of nationally and internationally recognized artists. It engages audiences with innovative experiences through its inspiring and thought provoking events and programming. Transformer Station alternates as a venue for
exhibitions curated by the Bidwells from their renowned collection of contemporary art and exhibitions organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art. Fred Bidwell, Director of Transformer Station, is also founder and executive director of FRONT a new art triennial coming to Cleveland in the summer of 2018, under the artistic direction of Michelle Grabner and Jens Hoffman.

Carol Mavor is an American writer, art historian, artist and a Professor of Art History at Manchester University. She has published five books. The first four were published by Duke University Press: Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs, Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess, Hawarden,
Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott and Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans soleil and Hiroshima mon amour. The most recent monograph, Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour, and her forthcoming book, Through the Eyes and Mouth of the
Fairy Tale, are both published by Reaktion. Mavor has written extensively on Teichmann’s work in her books and for journals including Cabinet magazine and Frieze Masters.

Deirdre Gribbin is a London based Irish composer Her music has been performed worldwide including The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York. Her orchestral work Empire States was an award winner in the 2003 UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers. Composed for feature films and theatre Gribbin is Senior Fellow in Composition at Trinity College of Music London, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Cleveland based string quartet, OPUS 216, comprised of independent, classically trained musicians, will perform Gribbin’s work in costumes created by the artist, continuing their history of collaboration with other creative disciplines and institutions, including the Cleveland Museum of Art.

• http://www.estherteichmann.com
• http://www.transformerstation.org