SYLPHEN TRILL

Guided by a desire to ambiguously traverse between interior and exterior worlds through the interaction of diverse media, Micha Eden Erdész (°1975 TORONTO, CANADA) is a contemporary artist engaging with Intermedia creation, curation, and artistic research. With a background in philosophy and architecture, artistic research, for Erdész, is a kind of sensory technology suggesting a subaltern layer of knowledge human, animal or neither. His formative influences include the works of Jack Goldstein, anchorites and suburban Toronto of the 1980s, particularly the carpeted basement of a Downsview split-level house with a blue door, a redundant home bar partially stocked by random liquors and beverages adorned the edge of this nether-land, fairground attractions; the Darkride, gravity rides, vertical rides, dodgems, hauntings, and fun houses imagined within the shopping mall. A singular cymbal remained in the same spot on the floor and behind the bottom of the stairs, the massive weight of an underfloor safe’s door remained always open and always empty. Tending towards human portrayals of the supernatural in folklore, fairgrounds and horror films, descriptions of consciousness, mutability and disappearance infect his work. Eschewing the structural clarity of the artist’s architectural and philosophical training in favour of more ephemeral, ghost-like evocations, fictions are emphasised over physical viability. Among works in oil on rosin and mirror-glass, textiles, chrome and video, some pieces involve the dextrous working of oil paint and fine drawings onto synthetic transparencies.

During a visit to the Bavarian state capital, he photographed and filmed this incunabulum of modern architecture and later adapted it and made it alien. Projected onto a Lycra fabric background, individual acrylic glass elements of the roof structure shine in the dazzling sunlight, raindrops fall onto the roof, the pylons cast shadows and the vertical lines of Olympic rings – added in later – structure the tableau. Despite its size, the picture does not appear monumental, but understated, almost intimate – as a representation of a perceived, captured and reflected moment that cannot be repeated. Andreas Kühne

Micha Eden Erdész's artistic practice is remarkably diverse. It ranges from artistic research to working in various media such as painting, photography, video and sculpture. The different techniques stand for different ways in which one can deal with a lived reality: through haptic, visual comprehension, through intellectual understanding or even supernatural sensation. In the respective works, he creates new spaces of experience for different aspects of reality. He encodes them in a separate language that seems to be detached from references and thus forms its own language, its own mystery. This in turn invites a viewer to decipher it, offering a wonderful escape into the artist’s imagination. Angela Stauber

His latest work explores the wildness of the Heath, but also how our culture designs have shaped it. Anna Behrmann

There’s little danger of anyone failing to register the visual and emotional of the art in The Liminal Phase, an exhuberent exhibition at Highbury Studios, Holloway. Alison Oldham

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