Lucie Stahl

In her photographic and sculptural works, Lucie Stahl addresses the ecological and psychological effects of extraction that shape our contemporary living environments. She investigates overproduction and related forms of processing and consumption – mechanisms of absorption, pumping, flowing, and the conversion of liquid resources into energy.

Instead of staging an explicit critique of a culture of consumption and excess, her art accommodates itself within its contradictions. Attraction and repulsion, fetishization and decay, control and randomness, gloom and humor coexist in her works. Shiny and reflective surfaces are often disturbed by irregularities – air bubbles, dust, fault lines – which bring out the unpredictability of the material. Organic and industrial elements, body and infrastructure are brought together, indicating that systems of extraction extend beyond economy and ecology into the psyche. In this way, Stahl's work traces how the contradictions of these systems have penetrated contemporary forms of subjectivity.