Petra Dzierzon. Germany

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Artist Statement
It's a cultural enrichment for Petra Dzierzon to make art-works with OBJETS TROUVES, which she founds on the flea markets of Berlin like a collection of trays for example. The material is the head for outline and design. Patterns develop from the combination of colors and form. The surface is the emotional thought and the over painted surface is a kind of wrapped material with high pigmented paints. She participates from time to time in work shops for „skilled trade“ or for „spiritual life“. She learns a certain know-how there and she can find always references to fine art. For using colors she learned a lot by the advantages of Berlin, like Urban and Street Art. She not uses only the classical brush or cut and paste, but she takes original techniques with tools from everyday life like brushes for dishes, pasta scraper or an electrical tooth-brush. With these tools she endeavored to develop her own style. Petra Dzierzon, born in 1965 in Gelsenkirchen, grew up in Essen. From her early years on she was fascinated by Joseph Beuyss, (Schloss Moyland). Now it is a great pleasure for her, that she can show pictures of Art Biennial 1, Artoteque in New York, Manhattan. The inspiration for the first series on Hahnemühle hand-signed fine art paper comes from the subconscious. The smaller series, Lukas Berlin, is made with brushes for dishes. The theme is female loneliness (Angelo Ribezzi, Rome). With her pictures she is telling a story: Borders and barriers which open up are the closed again. Petra makes a new start with psycho works who demonstrate a luxury of psychological energies who are concentrated like coated lacquer works on trays from Mexico. In a lot of her pictures the dominant graphic element is a precipitous language of form. Instead the general impression is a calming effect with small traces of ice.
(curator: Will Yaya, New York, march 2016)

Petra Dzierzon presents now different aspects of her individuality in art-life, here in the mirror of „magazine art“: CHAUMET. CHAUMET is PARIS. And CHAUMET/PARIS is JEWELLERY for more than 200 years. The catalogue CHAUMET is a present of the Galleries LAFAYETTE Berlin, a very beautiful magazine in a building that has a charming construction of circle with heights of deep harmony. With her work she asks: What is „self“.

Question 5: What is the self?
Consciousness is centered on something. It is not controversial, however, what that something is. A human being has the sense of a self which is there as the seat of consciousness. Nonetheless, there are those who argue that this self is an illusion. Within Dennett´s theory, for example, there is no real self. There is, according to this theory, a sense of self which is generated by unthinking agents which operate together within the brain. The concept of a self can seem as dubious as that of a “homunculus”, a little man who operates the controls of a person hidden behind the scenes.
In Buddhism, one of the key ideas is that there is no unchanging self. The avoidance of this idea springs from the Buddhist belief that everything is in a process of change. It would be, on the other hand, not be entirely correct to say that there is no self in Buddhism. In Dennett´s theory, and in many materialist theories, the self is considered to be an illusion. This is a counterintuitive idea and is problematic. It is hard to see how anyone can seriously believe that he or she has no existence as a person. This way of looking at the world seems to be like arguing that there is no personal freedom. It is possible to argue for a more limited concept of self. This is similar to proposing a more limited concept of freedom. In both cases, the more limited concepts may just be considered to be the outcome of various computational processes.
There does seem, though, to be a form of sophistry in these types of philosophical maneouvres. If someone is free only in the sense that they can articulate choices which they have been given, then what sort of freedom is this? Similarly, if someone only has a self as the point of convergence of various underlying computational processes, then what sort of self is this? As with the question of freedom, the question of the self does not have a straightforward solution in philosophy. There is also no generally accepted model of the self which is part of neuroscience. There is some agreement that not all the processes in the brain are coordinated from a central point. This, on the other hand, does not given a refutation or even an explanation of the self.
In Kant´s philosophy, the self is taken as a given from which he deduces the rest of his philosophical ideas of the mind. There must, in Kant´s system, at least be a perspective from which cognition and perception can flow. It may be the case that this concept of a single perspective is an illusion, but if it is, then what is really going on? All of the available neuroscientific data cannot provide an alternative model. It seems that the question of the self is thus, like many other questions related to consciousness, unanswered. It seems ironic that the answer to this question, one of the most important questions for human beings, is still not there.