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Eva Petric in Vienna

There are real Viennas and imaginary Viennas, and all of them are spectacular, and all of them are worth visiting while you’re here.  The city by day is rather different at night, but in all hours, there are multiple sides to Vienna, and multiple worlds here that exist simultaneously.  There are, of course, wonderful things for tourists, with excellent restaurants serving a stunning variety of food, great historical places of interest, and delightful hotels.  Vienna, Austria does everything with a style and gracefulness that is incomparable.  It has attracted great poets and musicians for centuries, and continues to draw some of the most creative and talented minds in the world.

It could be partially due to the multiple nature of the city, where artists have special kinds of vision that only see clearly when there is complexity.  Drawn to shadow as much as light, there is a vocabulary of desire here that artists here more than anyone else.  One of Vienna’s most interesting, and promising, artists, is Eva Petric.  The Slovenian artist works in a number of media, from photography to video to painting to painting with words, and there’s a remarkable element of performance in all of her works.  Remarkable because there’s nothing that resembles traditional representation, or if there is any representation here, it’s an intentional misdirection.

The viewer, the gazer, the one who looks, might see iconic images and words, and mentally take a trip into the work.  The work is laden with its own invisible landscapes, so that the experience is like entering into the cave in the middle of the world, and we’re being guided by a shaman who knows Jung like the back of Castaneda’s hand.  There are wolves at the door, and Jim Morrison is always making new movies in the otherworld next to her bathtub in the middle of the forest.  What’s really extraordinary about Eva Petric’s work is that you feel like you’ve interrupted a conversation between the living and the dead, but you’re always more than welcome to participate in the small talk, which large oceans are churning and the water is rising.  Her visual work can be seen at Suppan Contemporary, and her words have been published in several languages, and the rest can be seen at the Magic Theatre that exists somewhere in the forest between Slovenia and New York City, echoing traces of shadows that seem to know the lost words of the human heart.

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