Tatiana Blass

Tatiana Blass constructs complex abstract narratives with her performances, paintings, videos, and installations. For Penelope (2011), she took over an entire chapel and its courtyard with red carpet and yarn, leaving viewers to discern whether a loom in the apse is converting the chaotic tangles into the ordered textile, or vice versa. For her series “Half of the Speech on the Ground,” (2008-10), Blass altered musical instruments and rendered them silent: part performance and part sculpture (some of the pieces were fully realized by having musicians attempt to play them), these works aimed to explore the tension between construction and deconstruction, form and function. “The role of the artist is to provide some stimulation for new perspectives and reflection about the world,” she has said. “I think that it is to create a strange sensation, to create experiences other than day-to-day.”