Opening June 6, 5-10 pm!!
Schimmel Projects - Art Centre Dresden are excited to invite you to the solo exhibition ‘Doing Lucy’ by the Dutch artist Puck Verkade opening on Thursday, June 6, from 5-10 pm. ‘Doing Lucy’ is a six channel video installation featuring fictionalised reconstructions of early human ancestor Lucy in the lead role. In the fast paced montages of each episode various visual techniques like claymation, low-res animation, altered found footage, regenerated MIDI notes of pop songs and on-cam performance are entangled to co-exist. Lucy is a paleontological specimen that received worldwide attention and obtained celebrity status in 70s popular science. To this day she's globally displayed across natural history museums, her ancestral profile and physical appearance have been remixed, repurposed and rewritten in numerous variations.
“Lucy seemed to me a fitting conduit to voice how both fiction and fact are needed to speculate on the blurry lines between human and animal, and the impact of centuries of bias and power dynamic.”
In her video based practice Puck Verkade revisits popular phenomena taken from science, culture, history and mass-media as tokens of paradoxical human behaviour. She chips away at widely accepted truths or archetypical depictions that are culturally regurgitated and hijacks them with an absurdist yet critical agenda. The videos have the sensation of a moving collage; a dense juxtaposition of layered images in a cartoonesque reality shifting between the visual scope of animations, advertisements and homemade recordings.
Puck Verkade (1987, The Netherlands) received her BFA from the Royal Academy of Art in The Netherlands and completed her MFA Fine Art with distinction at Goldsmiths University, London in 2017. Verkade lives and works between London and The Hague. Her work has been shown internationally at various venues such as LISTE Art Fair (Basel, 2018), ARCO Lisboa (Lisbon, 2018), If So What?/Palace of Fine Arts (San Francisco, 2018), Sunday Art Fair (London, 2017) and many more. We are very proud to be able to present Puck Verkade at her first solo exhibition in Germany, at Schimmel Projects - Art Centre Dresden.
Photos by Rasmus Roos Lindquist.