OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE
2012 — 2021
Fine Art Prints on Hahnemühle, 70x100 cm

Sissa Micheli presents us with a series of four large-format photographic works in which she combines various objects to form bizarre, witty ensembles. In her work, the artist refers to the literary concept of the objective correlative, which was first used by the American painter Washington Allston (1797-1843) and had become known through the writer T. S. Eliot (1888-1965). It describes how a chain of objects or situations can be used to create a sensual experience that evokes a particular emotion in us. Sissa Micheli implements this philosophical postulate in her photographs by achieving new connections of meaning through the apparently absurd linking of things. The staging can generally be described as an essential part of Sissa Micheli's artistic work. In this concrete work, she brings objects together for a photographic moment and thus removes them from their usual meaning. The central motif of this series is the correlative of a bedside lamp with a blue glass shade, which forms the center of a small universe on which a plastiscope in the form of a plastic alpine house is located, enclosed by a horn comb as a symbolic garden fence. Already hinted at in the title of the series, Sissa Micheli playfully picks up on the attitude to life from the heyday of South Tyrolean tourism from the 1960s/1970s onwards, creating miniature worlds full of irony and referential power.

– Sabine Gamper