Boundary Issues: Helmut, Leipzig

Boundary Issues | Helmut, Leipzig, Germany, 2024

Paintings, Handmade wallpaper, orange Iighting, table installation, knitted frames

Exhibition Text:

Boundary Issues is a hyper-orange installation designed to activate your amygdala. 

Centered around research in attachment theory and addiction studies, the work aims to stimulate the brain region that is impacted by early developmental trauma. The same region is responsible for mediating fear and stress responses. Boundary Issues investigates the feeling of precarity with the use of an overbearingly orange room. 

Orange walls, irritating lighting, an orange carpet, an orange table, and knitted orange bits use the strangeness of monochrome to trespass an psycho-aesthetic boundary. Loud colors, grim faces and silly props explore co-dependent, disenchanted and blissful entanglements. 

I first showed some of the Boundary Issues paintings at my atelier in Germany, during Leipzig's West-side open studio event last spring. Locals gave unbridled feedback about the loudness of orange. Orange, it turns out, makes people talk. 

And so we ate oranges and talked about the color orange. Later, I made several scribbles to try to make sense of it. 

How can inanimate images, color and space create renditions of relational feelings? How are boundaries reinforced, subverted, demolished? What about orange is so given to a certain kind of invasive zeal? Is it akin to an overbearing kind of love?

Orange you glad we met?

Without giving any conclusions, this exhibition is a playful attempt at simulating a general sense of precarity with oneself and one's immediate social world, generally understood as a set of “boundary issues.”