TEXTGAP
Centre d`Art Neuchâtel, 2006

PRESS RELEASE The work of Isabel Schmiga catches the eye with a discrete clarity. They are distinguished by a kind of poetic strength which results in a peculiar combination of disconnected objects and materials that ultimately unite. Isabel Schmiga's process can be described as a combinatory process, which brings to mind collage. Working in a scientific mode, so to speak, she lays out a conceptual field for her artistic procedure. As a draftswoman and sculptress she mostly combines materials from her immediate every day life. Her media plays with the gaps text and image unavoidably produce. Her process is idiosyncratic in that a game between text and picture emerges. We see this especially in the graphical installation SEAMING: eyes cut out of magazines are equipped with artificial lashes, displayed horizontally at eye level in a line on the wall. Extracted from the familiarity of the face, the eyes become borderlines on a map, dividing space. Their linear repetition produces singular lines that read like "stanzas" unfolding in a contiguous array in which the eyes look at the viewer as much as the viewer looks at the artwork. Scanning this borderline at close range, the viewer finds these lashes moving uncannily in their own eyes' misperception. The eyes in a row depict the repetition of vision itself as though analogizing its experience: oscillating between precision and delusion.

Isabel Schmiga works as an explorer. She collects data, enables comparisons, builds genealogies, and in so doing, critically questions what is generally accepted as reality. Approaching the nature scientific knowledge in her work does not mean confirming it; rather, her work produces poetic collisions hidden in our blind spot of our eyes.

ANNEMARIE REICHEN
Director CAN, Centre d'art Neuchâtel, 2006