Barbara Seiler

“When I’m bored, all I have to do is make a red knot and look at it.”
-Augustine

In his study of hysteria, early psychologist and director of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris J. M. Charcot relied on a 15 year-old woman, known as Augustine, who came to his hospital in 1876. “A,” “G,” “L,” & “X” are the four different initials assigned to her at different points in time. Charcot, who was also the professor of young Sigmund Freud, explored the symptoms of hysteria, “a supreme vehicle for expression”, which he defined as a neurological disease. It is Augustine who appears most often in image and words throughout the archive of Charcot’s work.

In her first solo exhibition in Switzerland, Shana Lutker (*1978, USA) presents a group of works that function like Augustine’s knots, a collection of objects to be looked at, but don’t instantly reveal themselves. Here, looking takes time. The things circulate, repeat, come back in different form, material or texture. Things look like things they are not, are familiar but unnamable, or have no name. They are tightly wound, or deathly still, waiting for a purpose, or to be remembered.

The objects and images that comprise A. G. L. & X. stem from the legacies and relics of psychoanalysis and surrealism and recall the strategies and concerns of figures like Sigmund Freud and Andre Breton, but they are decidedly of the present. They refer to the images, instruments and architecture of the Hospital Salpêtrière, which still operates as teaching hospital, and which Lutker has visited recent months.

Some of the works in the exhibition were made by the artist, re-makes of things seen or told in these archives, some were found or bought as they appear. They are installed in groups and associations. Yellow Sun blinds cover the windows of the gallery, referring to the yellow blinds at the Salpêtrière, and collapse the domestic architecture of the gallery onto the grounds of the Hospital in Paris.

The works in the exhibition can also be seen as stand-ins; for Augustine, and the other patients collected and presented by Charcot, and later, Freud, but also for the well-known collections of antiquities, primitive artifacts, and oddities of these figures.

Drawing from the archives of psychoanalysis and surrealism, Shana Lutker’s work takes shape in a variety of mediums and materials, and foregrounds the relationship between truth and interpretation. A. G. L. & X. is a continuation of the body of work shown at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects last year in the exhibition H. Y. S. T. et al. Other recent solo exhibitions include Wetterling Gallery in Stockholm, the Suburban in Oak Park IL, the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco and Artists Space in New York. Her work has been included in the 2006 and 2008 California Biennials and Performa 09, as well as recent group exhibitions at Mass MOCA, Luckman Fine Arts Gallery at CalState LA, D’Amelio Terras, and Harris Lieberman in New York, among others.