Vernon Projekt – Alena Foustková – Basic Memory
ALENA FOUSTKOVÁ (1957, Karviná)
Alena Foustková studied graphic design under Doc. Ladislav Čepelák at the Academy of Fine Art. She completed her studies in 1982 and worked for two years in Prague and Ostrava. She worked mainly on creating prints. In 1984 she left then Czechoslovakia and she and her husband moved to Toronto, Canada, where she studied commercial art at George Brown College. In Canada she worked in advertising, but she also continued to create art. In 1995 she returned to Prague. She worked as a creative director for advertising agencies and won a number of important awards in this field.
She exhibited her work in Toronto in 1989 and she has exhibiting work in the Czech Republic since 2005.
She has been working as a freelance artist since 2008. She also teaches art, advertising and design at international universities in Prague such as UNYP and Prague College. In 2010 she had an exhibition at Galerie Kritiků in Prague and took part in a joint exhibition with other Czech-Canadian artists at the New Town Hall. In April 2011 the public had an opportunity to see her work in an independent exhibition at Galerie města Blanska.
BASIC MEMORY
Basic Memory is a site-specific installation that takes the exhibition
space itself, its memory and its soul, as its theme. Each year as many
as eight artists pass through the gallery space. Each time the space is
inhabited, used, adapted, and reshaped as the artist wishes and is then
vacated to make way for the arrival of the next visitor, the next
artist. What does the space remember? How does the space come across and
what is it like in reality?
The artist covers the entire external wall, the surface/wrapper of
Vernon Projekt, with a pencil drawing depicting the gallery’s interior.
Through cut-out holes in the drawing viewers can peek inside at the body
of the space, which begins to reveal its inner world.
Alena Foustková’s installation is created out of a combination of
drawing and a video projection. The human elements thus mixes with the
cold impersonal documentary level of a technical recording that inside
the gallery is mediated through a spatial installation made out of 100
pieces of school erasers on which the image is recorded. Erasers
symbolise the gradual erasure of our memory. The resulting composition
thus captures both the practical and the inner character of a space that
has undergone a dramatic change in function – in the past it was a
shop, and now it’s a gallery.
CONTACT
Markéta Faustová / PR
+420 773 915 501
marketafaustova@seznam.cz
