tisch im raum invites Aaron sheppard

Opening, performance, talk, dinner table: Wednesday, 06.07.2011, 8 pm (punctual)

At the opening, Aaron Sheppard, artist from Las Vegas, will show his performance “the cake in the room”, followed by a talk at the dinner table with Klaus Schafler referring to questions by Stefanie Seibold.

“… Franz von Bayros, Lewis Carroll, John Tenniel, Georges Bataille, Marie Antoinette, Jesus Christ, and a Vegas showgirl walk into a bar… A tea party or a bedtime story?… madness or mayhem?… by the peanuts or buy the butter?… raven or Jabberwocky?… another head rolls and jelly for supper… twinkles flitter… twitters clutter… and besides, it makes no matter, Ms. Hatter, I’m already phat and happy… A gathering, a sip or taste of, something to sustain, or gorge on together… the body. LET US EAT CAKE!...”

I work in painting, performance, installation and sequential art. My work engages sexuality and gender identity, often queer and transgender cultural politics. The gaze, often more specifically the male gaze, conceptually returns in my work often innocent yet simultaneously exploitative, otherwise voyeuristic.
My current concentration has been on painting and drawing, incorporating sculptural accents. Rauschenberg’s “combines” have been used to describe my own assemblage of materials in this work. Also similar in ways to books created by Max Ernst, I freehandedly collage imagery of the Decadent Movement with fairytale or children’s story illustrations, concentrating on line work each produced as etchings. Frames are an integral element to encase a mood of Victorian exuberance borderline with something raw primitive. These wall works intricately inform/are informed by my performance works.
Since the mid1990s, while still in my undergraduate studies, I have consciously incorporated my own body. Images drawn or collaged are referential of my physical body and/or my mind’s projections upon it as the element for autobiographical expression. I also continue to use my body as canvas and object. The performative nature of my work has evolved in the last few years from purely spectacle, as physically engaging within the space of my viewers, to a more objectification of the body as living sculpture.
(Aaron Sheppard)

tisch im raum is a recurring exhibition format designed as a laboratory, a space for dialogue and a dinner table landscape, self-organizing and intervening in exhibitions and its intermediate spaces. Guests who investigate diverse phenomena of the art field present an artistic position that is relevant in their work and enter into a dialogue with another invited guest. The evening closes together with the audience at a dinner table in the exhibition space.

Guest: Aaron Sheppard, artist, Las Vegas
 Questions by Stefanie Seibold, artist, Stuttgart / Vienna
Composition sound+music: David Sanchez Burr, Las Vegas
Dinner table: menue by Roman Steger, Ö1 Genussschule
Concept: Andrea Löbel, Lina Morawetz, Klaus Schafler, with Christina Nägele