In My Mold

Under the title In My Mold the three person exhibition at Galerie Anton Janizewski, curated by Miriam Bettin, brings together new works by Justin Chance, Mona Filleul, and Monika Grabuschnigg. Their mainly sculptural practices based on the everyday are charac- terized by processes of molding and/or modifying/covering objects of daily use. Familiar yet alien things are combined in unexpected ways to create uncanny feelings. In this dialectical process, the works reveal the immanent political dimension of the personal. The exhibition title does not only refer to the artistic practices but is also a description of a (not solely human) condition in which one cannot get out of one’s own skin or, in the broader literal sense, is stuck in mold. All the more emphasized through the heavily ornamented art nouveau architecture of the gallery space, the works on display circle around the thin line and the tipping point between celebration, intimacy, seduction, and the morbid, grotesque, and melancholic of the everyday and the private realm. Following Juliane Rebentisch and her thoughts on critical melancholia, the feeling of melancholia is caused through a lost object whereby the object can be a person, an idea, an identity, a mode of living. The objects in the exhibition are distanced and partly lost because covered, blurred, alienated, or animated. Appealing at first, they turn out to be traps or cul-de-sacs, revealing their eerie banality that can easily turn into danger.