The monoprints of Xixi Edelsbrunner are made with and from casts of many things, taken from the environment and re-located into another environment. The objects, or at least their sources, are sometimes recognizable and stimulate our assumptions and artistic categories: are they autobiographical, surrealist, political, decorative, representations, reproductions? This drifting of intelligibility is a large part of their interest: they speak to our habit of “diagnosing” a thing into its categorical classification before proceeding to truly perceive it.

The sculptures in the Proxy Gallery are cast from empty packaging forms that hold another object together in a box for the purpose of safely shipping and keeping the weight down. The works are from empty negative forms that Edelsbrunner fills with colored polyurethane resin and now makes them positive. They broadcast their original liquidity that hardens into solidity. The positive casts they call “monoprints.” There is only one of each, in this case in pastel pink, lavender and aqua. Being cast from “negatives,” all of them exhibit the indexicality of photographs. In some we can see the imprint of pens or batteries while others are more mysterious and make us wonder what is missing from that solid form that has no space to contain anything anymore. It is a solid object now inside another container, the Proxy Gallery. Another way to think of casts is to think of casting of actors in films, i.e deciding to insert a person into a role or inserting a role into a person. Edelsbrunner does this: they cast their objects into certain roles, but at the same time they cast them adrift, to inhabit different locations and classifications in the mind. https://xixiedelsbrunner.com