Susanne M. Winterling

A multidisciplinary artist living and working in Berlin, Susanne M.
Winterling August-September exhibition at Daniel Reich Gallery
received rave reviews. Her work is included in the Shenzhen Biennial
and Winterling will be featured in the upcoming 5th berlin biennial
for contemporary and Art Basel Statements. Daniel Reich Gallery is
proud to present a new body of her work at the Next Fair in Chicago.

Winterling¹s work plays with the ephemeral nature of film and
photography as it parallels the viewer¹s identification and self-
creation. Winterling¹s photographs and videos emphasize the shadow
play quality of her media as an aesthetic means of coaxing the world
of subjective interpretation. Consistent with an interest in the
locale of the stories she investigates, Winterling new series on the
invention of film considers the role Chicago played in the
introduction of the kinetoscope (the first movie projector).

Winterling¹s project centers on the mystery surrounding the much
anticipated unveiling of the kinetoscope. While the appearance of the
first kinetoscope at the 1893 Chicago World¹s Fair was widely
promoted, it is unclear as to whether or not the device itself
actually made it. In magazine reports of the time, it is both absent
and present: a testament to the power of rumor, reporting and writing
in developing reality much like the alchemy of the negative. It is
more likely that Thomas Edison, George Eastman and William Dickson¹s
miraculous machine had had a comparatively humble debut coincidentally
(gender is of interest to the artist) at the National Federation of
Women¹s Clubs two years prior where attendees recall peering through a
hole in a large wooden box, to see a tiny man peering out and tipping
his hat in greeting.

Winterling¹s installation in Chicago is premised on the challenges
moving images presented to photographers who had to conceive three-
dimensional scenes for the camera¹s eye for the first time. At the
same time, Winterling will equate the story of kinetoscope with the
nature of film and its varied interpretations. For example, the
kinetoscope offered New Jersey State Senator James A. Bradley, a means
of appealing to a constituency concerned with the suppression of
vice. Where the Women¹s Club had discovered a miniature man tipping
his hat, Senator Bradley found, to his horror, the exposed ankles and
shoelaces of motion picture actress. In his view the evolution of
technology had presaged a moral devolution expressed in a vaporous
³intense sexuality across the footlights.² Winterling¹s installation
is a space of possibility in deference to the wish fulfillment of the
viewer developing a reality suited to their needs in motion pictures.
Drawing on the kinetoscope¹s coffin-like shape from which flickering
artificial life first emerged, Winterling¹s installation reincarnates
(like the historical record of an archival film) the automatic female
dancer of vaudeville.