Marcelino Stuhmer (°1971, Salt Lake City, USA)						© 2005 Galerie Kusseneers
						As memory operates in both subjective and objective languages, it constantly mixes personal desire, imagination and guilt with learned perceptions based on collective, social or cultural memory/amnesia. How one pieces together and interprets reality is thus related to how one constructs memory. Since memory is highly subjective there is little certainty on how it actually operates and how reliable its sensations are as interpretations of experience. The recent work examines memory as the social, psychological and emotional location of the self. Although these works are independent and are executed in a variety of media, shown together, narrative and conceptual strands will be formed inevitably between them. The work addresses issues of looking and remembering but most importantly it is about a personal interpretation of reality. I am interested in the idiosyncratic and how issues of one's profession, geography and home, as well as the images one retains from television and cinema are all filters and symbols used (both consciously and unconsciously) to examine experience and to re-construct how one remembers it. In my work I allow different and seemingly contradictory versions of an experience to exist side-by-side, separating memory/sensory impulses. Memory is an imperfect collage, and by using the same imagery in different circumstances, mediums and contexts, issues of interpretation and language not only arise but also become part of the content. All the series of works, from video, photography and painting, have been named after famous American song titles from the 1950's and 60's: My baby just cares for me, I'll be seeing you and I put a spell on you. I have appropriated what some of these songs stand for, their nostalgia, emotion, and even absurdity, but the songs themselves are not actually heard in the work. More importantly, all these songs have been interpreted again and again by different artists. I am interested in the act of interpretation as a personal gesture toward memory and real human experience. For this reason, I have chosen to work in a variety of media to interpret and re-interpret these issues of memory construction. I wish to explore the unique visual and conceptual parameters of each medium, especially the perception of time and temporality while allowing relationships between the different works to develop. With this there is the issue of disorientation, of being out of place and what happens to one's sense of self, when faced with the need or desire to interpret what is essentially mysterious. Marcelino Stuhmer
		Those people following me, they're not human! 2004 Oil on canvas 40 x 95 cm.
		Listen to me, we're in danger! Panel 1 /4 2004 Oil on canvas 40 x 60 cm
		Listen to me, we're in danger! Panel 2/4 2004 Oil on canvas 40 x 60 cm