Urban
Call for Entries Accepted Artists

Artist Artemis Herber

Owings Mills (Baltimore), Maryland, USA

Motel
Acrylic Painting

Artist Statement
MOTEL examines the relationship between space and place – a way of life of travel, mobility and nomadism as well as our basic need for a place to live, a place of safety, protection and orientation. I explore contexts of transit, viewpoints from peripheries of urban life, experiencing myself in lost spaces, exposed to feelings of alienation.  With MOTEL, I reach out into empty, deserted spaces associated with transit: I look for orientation in a dehumanized world, exploring a seemingly abandoned place, devoid of people. The motel suggests an architecture of waiting, with forbidding facades, no entrance, window or driveway to welcome the viewer’s eye.  Only the roofing provides shelter and reminds us more of a desolate bus stop or station, protecting but not welcoming or inviting. Revealing the apparently hidden, I use corrugated cardboard to tear and peel layers of paper, unveiling corrugations, which I integrate into the texture and composition.

The cardboard’s aesthetics of rawness and roughness, incorporated tears, cuts and paper shreds emphasize the crumbling architecture of motel and provoke a certain bleakness of a city landscape and its state of neglect and instability. Partly disrupted, the material and treatment reflects themes of forsaken places, ruined construction and thwarted economic development.

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