Armature

“Armature” is the artist’s first solo show in  St. Louis.  The exhibition features ceramics, sculpture, and multimedia work that explore the personal and cultural legacies of industrialization, mechanization, and mass production. Combining mass-produced objects and trash with with natural materials such as clay, dirt, and grass, Stemmler recasts these industrial (by)products as main characters in an alternate, fragmentary history of late capitalism. Playing off the multi-perspectival aspect of the artist’s work, the show’s title harnesses the several, seemingly contradictory meanings of the term “armature,” which simultaneously connotes both underlying framework or structures and also armor or physical or spiritual defenses. Rather than working to conceal or resolve this tension, Stemmler’s sculptures make themselves at home in this point of disjuncture, inviting the viewer to do the same."  -Liz Wolfson, Co-Director of Flood Plain Gallery, St. Louis, MO.