Galerie b2

To have time? It is an abstract possesion, characterized by the absence of alternatives, a nothingness of great value. Time plays a central role in the daily struggle with the calendar, fought on our smartdevices, for meetings and deadlines. Time is money and an equivalent to wage labor. What does this mean for an artist? People argue that wage labor and labor have long been seperated, but has it not always been that way? Engagement, with our without pay. Our salary is the current, pecuniary measure for our work, but not for its value. Working, producing, creating. The value of our work is something lively, time-dependent, an inciting moment in the plot of our lives with permanence, growth or decline as possible outcomes.
Titling her exhibition „a question of time“ Bea Meyer highlights a foundational factor of her work. Time and again the conceptual artist adresses parameters of her existence and her production within the greater framework of our being. Meyers work are characterized by a natural, intuitive minimalism with subcutaneous effects. They discuss society, beauty, chance and our „Vita Activa“. Meyer depicts, unveils, presents backdrop phenomena. Phenomena precisely because her works do not take a stance, they do not point a finger, do not reference a better world or suggest change. If at all, it is us considering Meyers works an affront, because we are thrown back to our own contradictions.
Bea Meyer is simultaneously an involved actor and astute observer of everyday life, a protagonist of contemporary society. And she is in the thick of it. She is an artist, a business associate and mother of three children. At the same time she maintains an intellectual distance and receptive intuition towards the system. Issues come to her. Nonetheless her work above all is art. As a postgraduate in media art she is well aware of the aesthetic autonomy of the single work. In a surprising and maybe even in a unique way conceptual art and craftmanship are intertwined in her work without friction. Deliberately her works entail a time-consuming, craft-oriented production process. Again and again she is occupied for weeks or even months – mechanically using her hands – to complete her „work“.
In the current exhibition, Meyer shows a series of large scale images, which rely on the conjunction of man and machine. What seems to visually reproduce an abstract agglomeration of jagged coastline fragments, actually is a seismographic recording of an interaction between technology and man. Vibrations between the artist and a means of transportation on high speed. A synergy of external stimuli and intuition. No reference to starting point or destination. Covering a distance. Interference of distance and movement. Meyer focuses on a side effect of technology and the irrelevance of the want for arrival. Vibrations as a formative assistant. She scales up her drawn recordings and transfers them onto paper in embroidery. Lines become planes and loose their direction. There is no use in increasing the speed, if we are moving in the wrong direction.
Maybe it is a causal link to the namesake of her birthplace Karl-Marx-Stadt, that make Meyer occupy herself with time and labor artistically. The parameters are valid for all of us. Occupation as creative leeway between satisfaction and being overburdened. Self-determination and self-exploitation of an artist in times of profitsharing and free-rider effects. It is dark, nocturnal in the small room. Canvases displaying the fluorescent, mantra-like message „Arbeiten“ („Work“) are put up on the walls. Infinitive and imperative at the same time, an unconjugated verb, adressing everyone so to speak, as a request or even command. In rank and file, decent. In signal red and in grey on grey it is written, subtly luminous. No, not stitched manually. Meyer declares a personal war with – or rather against – the machines, embroidery robots, nightshift workers that never know exhaustion. She becomes a commissioner, she outsources, concentrates on the supervision of labor and becomes a link in her very personal value chain.
The exhibition title „a question of time“ is simultaneously the title of the central wall-painting, depicting artistic activity over the course of the last 16 years. A spacious timeline visually organizes and quantifies the time spent producing art, exhibitory activities and the birth of children: a performance chart devoid of emotion. Reference values are missing on purpose, we are forced to set the benchmarks ourselves. The artist herself is familiar with working to the point of total exhaustion, hallucinations, medical treatment as a consequence of being overworked. It is a liberty that artists can take: to overdraw ones personal account of time out of curiosity and for pleasure, to test the value and the rewards of ones actions and work. Time is fundamental, a limited resource. We can either like and keep up with it or elect to fight against it. Something is going to happen either way. Meyer leaves it to us.
Michael Grzesiak, 2014