Jennifer Oellerich

Rain Projects

The contemporary artist calls them Living Room Icons (Wohnzimmerikonen): they are images created by water damage on the walls of rooms. Once detached from their residential context and processed, an abstraction is reflected in the documentary characteristics of scientific photography. This abstraction raises the question of whether one is faced with a celestial vertigo or whether one is viewing a new strain of virus...

Rain Projects

The contemporary artist calls them Living Room Icons (Wohnzimmerikonen): they are images created by water damage on the walls of rooms. Once detached from their residential context and processed, an abstraction is reflected in the documentary characteristics of scientific photography. This abstraction raises the question of whether one is faced with a celestial vertigo or whether one is viewing a new strain of virus under the microscope; and this question remains to be answered. These works are abstracted from their corporeal appearance and suddenly, an entirely new and previously undetected dimension emerges glittering out of the mundane.

Some time ago Jennifer Oellerich discovered rolls of processed film in a flooded basement. She digitalized the damaged negatives to create abstract photographs she now calls Basement Lagoons (Kellerlagunen). The images formed during the process are that of the damage inflicted by water and time. There is no hint of underlying motifs at the source. By now the flooding has emulsified the film which has softened and sustained water damage and thus have become tattered and feeble. These images are in perpetual morphosis: every time the artist rescans a negative, she obtains a new picture, a new figure.

These works by the artist collectively represent an inventory of the damage from the creative process.

In another series of pictures by Jennifer Oellerich, the rain simultaneously is both the tool and medium. The artist allows the raindrops strike the material directly and process it. In the Blue Pencil Works, landscape shots are printed on inkjet paper and are subjected to rain a number of times. Raindrops erase the ink and leave traces which shroud the image.

Synoptic Codes (Synoptische Codes), on the other hand, are the result of partially veiled printouts processed under the rain. Emerging forms reflect the geometric symbols coded by meteorologists to emphasize various rain and cloud conditions on weather maps. Each work is a manifestation of a meteorological state of the weather, defined with the aid of rain. Jennifer Oellerich´s works can also be interpreted in the ancient sense of the word 'meteorology' as a study of the earth's atmosphere.

Jochen Proehl (Curator)