"The tension lodged within the works of Birgit Jürgenssen and Noelia Towers is on full display in this two-person exhibition at Slip House. Swinging between the former's illustrations and photographs, and the latter's crystalline painted images is a dance of surreal and penetrating depictions of womanhood; fraught, sentimental, peculiar, and everything in between. Jürgenssen's oeuvre, commonly recognized for its heterogenous nature, revolves around feminist inquiry and material experimentation. She exists just downstream from the Surrealist movement, wielding its psychosexual logics and nuanced formal avenues as a departure for her expressions of personhood, transformation, nature, and beyond. On view at Slip House, a selection of Jürgenssen's works on paper demonstrate the Austrian artist's penchant for altered bodily situations. The Echo in the Mountains, executed in 1977, sees a handgun hovering strangely in front of a subject-less hand, both forms cast above a craggly mountainscape, rolling hills, and a smattering of evergreen trees. This image runs counter to the hyperfocused body parts of Boundary Lines of a Lonely Knee and Veins - Borderlines in the Body (both 1978) in which Jürgenssen isolates anatomical elements."
"The photographs on view-three of which were executed using the cyanotype process-are the results of stratified imaginal worlds that coalesce into a singular one. This sensibility is one that recurs across the board in the artist's work, as she tends to collate different aspects into a coherent framework. In an interview with Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein from 2003, Jürgenssen explains: "I am not interested in depicting things themselves. Things only become exciting when the relations existing between them move to the foreground.""
The two-person show pairs Birgit Jürgenssen's heterogeneous practice with Noelia Towers's crystalline paintings to interrogate womanhood through surreal and material strategies. Jürgenssen employs illustration and photographic processes, including cyanotype, to assemble stratified imaginal worlds and to isolate altered bodily situations and anatomical fragments. Works juxtapose uncanny objects and body parts against landscapes, producing unsettling relational dynamics. Towers's crystalline painted images operate as counterpoints that amplify and refract themes of transformation, masquerade, and identity. The combined bodies of work navigate fraught, sentimental, peculiar, and penetrating modes of feminine representation.
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