Brigitte Spiegeler: Dream Variations

Although our age is dominated by digital technologies and an obsession with "truth," there is also a growing interest in the tactile and playful nature of (early) photography and printmaking. Since the invention of the "photogenetic drawing" by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1834, artist-photographers have worked without a camera, recovering or restoring traces of an object directly onto photosensitive paper.

After years of working with this return (and other forms) to the basic mode of photography, Brigitte Spiegeler takes it to a colourful new level in her latest body of work using the technique of the Risograph. The Risograph (and the development of soy-based ink) was created in 1946 in post-war Japan by Noboru Hayama in response to the expensive import of emulsion ink after the end of the war. He chose a poetic and fitting name to express how important it was for people not to lose their ideals during this period of despair. By incorporating this ideal directly into the name, Hayama founded "Riso," which means "ideal".

Spiegeler uses this "ideal" format as a source of productive imagination concerned with creating images, both their delicate appearance and fragile future, through the depicted layers that essentially materialise our relationship to time. She creates another way of making images that oscillate and temporarily return to the supposed transparency of the photographic medium with its documentary qualities, and especially the importance attached to its clarity and legibility. Through prints, Spiegeler turns familiar places and spaces into unfamiliar or uncanny creations. Her works are at the crossroads where spatial and temporal qualities invert and are captured on the surface of the print, which enables many layers that extend from the surface of the paper into time. She sets aside high-tech possibilities to turn back and focus on each moment that reveals different stories: real and imagined.

-Curator Dr. Lora Sariaslan

In the works in Dream Variations, Spiegeler portrays iconic individuals who were underappreciated in their own time. Through her work, she offers them a new age in which they are celebrated and cherished.

Beginning with research on the philosopher Spinoza, who faced banishment from the Jewish community of Amsterdam due to his philosophical beliefs, Spiegeler embarked on her journey. Alongside Spinoza, she included Olympe de Gouges, the outspoken advocate for women's rights during the French Revolution, whose life met a tragic end under the guillotine. For her Atlanta exhibition, Spiegeler welcomed iconic figures Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks into her repertoire. In Now is the Time, Speigeler focuses on Martin Luther King Jr.'s hand – a hand reaching out, connecting with others.