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Creating 4-sided piece in one week.

Always Somebody Moving
by Meghan Dailey

There is no question that Sol Kj�k is a superb draftswoman who excels at rendering the human figure in astonishing detail on paper, canvas and directly on the surfaces of walls. But conquering the two-dimensional realm is just one act of many that comprise her intricately choreographed, highly physical process.

Kj�k�s art implies constant motion, both in its making and in its subject. The bodies she depicts--male and female (usually herself), naked and often bald though some have vivid red hair--are forcefully active. They stretch and swing, link up into human chains, hang from one another�s limbs and lengths of hair. They lock limbs and converge into spheres of flesh, huddle and then unfurl, releasing their collective, coiled energy. This reflects Kj�k�s own state of constant motion, both when drawing and through her own poses as a model and subject. In the studio she and her co-performers engage in athletic moves: swinging from ropes, balancing on balls, and extending their bodies like acrobats. She photographs the actions, and those source images are then arranged collage-like, into compositions, which she gradually transforms into drawings.

The relationship between concept, execution and object is parti-cularly explicit in Kj�k�s site-specific piece for her Kunsthaus Tacheles show. Prior to the opening, she will live in the gallery for 7 straight days, drawing the large-scale piece directly onto a freestanding wall, racing to complete the work in time.

For much of that period, she is alone (solitude being the optimal condition for maximum concentration), eating and sleeping very little.
In the course of working so intensely, notions of the self and of time collapse, until mentally and physically, Kj�k reaches a heightened state in which she feels a part of the piece (various performance artists have spoken of achieving a trancelike state

Entre sol et ciel

transmits perfectly the notion of fragility and of accident, since the casting process introduces unexpected results, slight imperfections. The sculptures are also hung from braided human hair, which is both strong enough to hold a certain amount of weight yet also fragile, even unpredictable. There is a risk that the pieces, like the bodies rising and converging in her drawings, could fall�a maddening but tantalizing possibility of self-destruction colliding with a willful determination to be present.