Petra Groen

March-April 2009

About the artist: Petra Groen graduated at The Aki, (art academy) in Enschede, The Netherlands for her BFA and MFA at the department; Mixed Media. During her study she attended a student exchange program in San Francisco at the SFAI (San Francisco Art Institute. What started out as a three months period develop in a one-year stay at the SFAI. She received a grant, that made it possible to stay another year in the academy. She studied at the film department, film (16mm) and animation and at the New Genres department; performance and sculpture. After her graduation, she has been exhibiting her work in the Netherlands and Berlin. Short after that she received a commission for a public art piece in a park. She made a permanent floating object made out of fiberglass for the pond. After this she realized many more permanent and semi permanent public outdoor art pieces and also site specific art pieces in public buildings throughout the Netherlands and the USA. In 2005 she made a first move back to the USA. And now she is traveling back and forward between her Brooklyn studio and Amsterdam. Besides her activities in her studio she is also a visiting artist at several academies, in the Netherlands and in the USA, and she gives workshops and leads projects with companies and in schools. Project Description During the first weeks of my Sculpture Space residency, I worked on an installation using skin colored nylon stockings; using the installation room as a blank canvas to create a bodily interior. By sewing, cutting, and stretching the stockings onto the walls and the ceiling, I wanted to create a space that gives the feeling of walking among layers of bodily tissue like membranes and muscles stretched apart. The shadows play an important role creating a disorienting depth to the installation. By the second half of the residency I started to make installations inside a frame, which created a laboratory kind of setting for the bodily works. The installations resembled the bodily functions: communication, transportation, receiving and releasing. One of the pieces is called: Reciprocate. Besides that I have been working on several wall pieces of nylon stockings, first only in skin color; later I had experimented with white colored stockings. Experimenting with collages and drawings played an important role throughout my residency. Artist statement:“We only know what we see and experience.” Physical presence is one of the most important characteristics of the objects and installations. Their life-like physicality invites touch. They often look very sensual. The soft rose skin color supports this impression. The titillating experience is not a direct result of the way in which the objects are assembled, the physical component remains in the tangible objects and installations. Allusions to the Human body are rather a rule than an exception, but they are never literal. The sculptures not only reflect fragments of the body parts or the desire to analyze the body; to assemble, mutate, manipulate or compose the body once again. The newly materialized bodies as sculptures primarily reflect emotions, experience and routine; an often ambivalent relation between emotion and intellect, body and soul, sensory perception and rational comprehension. The exploration and final dissolution of this dichotomy is a veiled focus that does not directly manifest on the surface of the objects and installations. Much of the work is discovered in analysis and investigation. Nature in all of its varied forms: growth processes, cell structures, and microbiology play an important role in this investigation