Myriam Thyes

Myriam Thyes

portrait of Myriam Thyes, 2007
Born 1963 (age 51–52)
Luxembourg
Nationality Swiss
Education Nan Hoover
Alma mater Zurich University of the Arts, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
Known for new media
Notable work 'Flag Metamorphoses'
Website
www.thyes.com

Myriam Thyes (born 1963 in Luxembourg) is a new media artist from Switzerland. She lives and works in Düsseldorf.

RaumWelten, Museum Baerengasse, Zürich, 2013
Malta As Metaphor, Shedhalle Zürich, 2011
Flag Metamorphoses, Halle Zehn, CAP Cologne, Cologne, 2010
Flag Metamorphoses, Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, 2008
Flag Metamorphoses, Urban Screens Manchester, 2007

Biography

Myriam Thyes was born in Luxembourg and grew up in Zürich. After getting certificate of higher education entrance, she studied at Hoehere Schule für Gestaltung Zurich, now ZHdK Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland. 1986 to 1992, the artist studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Düsseldorf, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, painting with Professor Rissa, and videoart with Professor Nan Hoover. She received a degree 'Meisterschueler' from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Since 1994, Thyes participates in exhibitions and festivals internationally.[1][2]

Since 1999, main artistic media of Myriam Thyes are video art, 2D animation, photography, and digital imagery. From beginning of 2000 she initiates and realizes as well participatory projects and media art projects in public space. She co-founded artist group Strictly Public [3] who were invited to participate at Berlin media art festival transmediale.04. Already in 2000 and 2001 Strictly Public showed video art at metro stations in North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany), and 2002 in 26 main stations of the federal railroad all over Germany, Thyes work [3] for example DV PAL video 'A little meditation', the animation of the yin yang symbol, on big screen at Main station Frankfurt/Main during video art programme 'Strictly public'.[3] 'Strictly public' could be seen on monitors in stores and on billboards on Sunset Boulevard at new media festival LA Freewaves 2004 in Los Angeles under artistic director Anne Bray. Cathrien Schreuder: 'Myriam Thyes' work A Little Meditation[3][4] on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood is a good example. In order to maintain its own form, her animated yin-yang symbol 'fights against the influences of commerce, and in doing so wrests a place for itself in the streetscape. Employing a universal idiom, Thyes visualizes the imbalance within the force filed of oublic space.'[3] 'The fact that the work is a good supplement to the streetscape on which it has been shown, including the screens in the train stations of Düsseldorf, the Victory Park Screens in Dallas [5] and various screens in Bern, Bosnia, Melbourne, Manchester [6] and Dublin.'[3]

Thyes' themes deal with symbols, myths and visual signs from architecture, politics, movies, and religions, but as well mythical characters from Hollywood movies, and female characters form different cultures and epochs.[7]

Thyes is represented by the media art foundation 'Imai – inter media art institute' [8] (Germany) and videokunst.ch (Switzerland). She is member of Deutscher Künstlerbund (visual artists association, Germany) and Visarte (visual artists association, Switzerland).

Works

One of her best known works – frequently shown in exhibitions and festivals internationally – is the participatory animation project Flag Metamorphoses.[3][7][9] She started in 2005 a continuously growing series of Flash animations concerning flags, other national symbols, and relations between countries. It's a work about relations between nations and identities: each artist who creates a flag animation expresses such a relation in his or her own way. So far, the series contains 39 animations by 30 international artists and teams. All animations together include about 100 different nations.

Thyes's work is a very particular response to what she describes a very human 'double wish' to have both an individual identity and yet belong to a bigger group, often represented through nations, which are themselves 'imagined communities'. On her choice of flags as iconic Stimuli, Thyes recognises that their symbolism often endures beyond the actual conditions a nation lives through, sometimes remaining largely aspirational: 'Flags have become very significant again during the last few years - in sports, politics and fundamentalist Propaganda.'[7] In the late 1990s she worked with flags as installations in public areas: She created and painted new designs and Symbols on flags and hung them beside and between official flags. Then, in the last three years, she started working again with themes she had used before in painting, drawing and photo assemblies, but this time with animation.

Myriam Thyes recognised that the key concept of changing cultures was readily revealed through the use of animation's core language of metamorphosis, and in the way animation could reveal and yet challenge the dense meanings embedded in national image Systems: Animation is a wonderful and perfect way to express transformations and recreations. The abstract and graphical language of Flash fits with flags and other Symbols. When working with Flash, I can look at the result immediately and make changes quickly - this resembles drawing, painting or other direct techniques. Some people may think animation doesn't Support art because they only know the commercial use of it, but even in the commercial sector, Japanese anime feature films contain a lot of artistic imagination.'[7]

Thyes participated in the 'Art Colony Galichnik' in Macedonia in Summer 2010. Artists and curators from various Balkan countries worked together, Thyes asked her subjects to answer in their mother tongue (Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, Macedonian, Bulgarian and Albanian) and then subtitled their replies into English. She created a collage of images and voices in a two-channel video installation, called From Art Colony Galichnik with love (Macedonia 2010). 'Thyes documents the thoughts of her subjects and combines their words with shots of the countryside. She creates a sensitive picture of the different personalities and characters, partly by matching the two sets of images. The shots of landscapes and towns depict the origins of the person speaking or emphasise the content of what is being said. Thyes, who has Swiss and Luxembourgian roots, puts the individual at the heart of her work. In doing so, she teils a story of the human needs that exist together at a specific point and place in time - and that, ultimately, reflect the needs that people experience at any time and anywhere in the world.[10]

The series of photos and photomontages Glasgow Styles[11] reflect the artist's impressions of the post-industrial city of Glasgow and her inhabitants. Thyes has drawn a social portrait and created a kind of contemporary "Historienbilder" (historical paintings). Michael Staab in 'The Whole Picture. Second Take' about this work:'... Now, in her series entitled Glasgow Styles, Myriam Thyes takes the consistent next step, and combines the realistic, serial and documentary potential of photography with the formative, allegorising and metaphor-creating traditions of the fine arts. She compiles individual snapshots into sequences that make lapses of time and changes of perspective visible, and also mounts photographs taken at geographically differing locations and at staggered points in time into altogether new pictorial inventions. The citizens of Glasgow, some of them mounted into the original pictures, happened to be at other locations in the same town at the time the pictures were taken. Thus the right people are in the pictures, only, as stated above, at a different place and at another time. and 'The divergence thus highlighted between space, time and individual remains tangible in Thyes’s works, and conveys to the viewer a profound sense of the mood of the people in this city. ...'[12]

Malcolm Dickson, director of Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow, in his text 'Glasgow Styles': 'Myriam Thyes' series 'Glasgow Styles' delineates how Glasgow as a contemporary city reflects its past through the present. Initially what seems like a random visual derive is coherently held together through a detailed narrative that the artist has perceptively encountered and which helps to inform Thyes' personal topography of our city. This topography is the city's changing face – a place historically and contemporaneously of contrasts and tensions.'[13]

Major exhibitions and festivals

(C = catalog)

Works in public collections

Selected Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ http://www.duesseldorf.de/kuenstlerleben/index.php?p=suche/kuenstlerleben/bildende_kuenstler/detail&id=454&ref=liste&page=1&Name=T duesseldorf.de Retrieved 21 February 2014.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 http://www.videokunst.ch/index.asp?Inhalt=kuenstler.asp&Id=713&Md=1&Stufe=0 videokunst.ch Retrieved 21 February 2014.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 Catrien Schreuder (2010). Pixels and Places – Video Art in Public Space. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. pp. 5, 27, 56, 61, 134, 147, 148. ISBN 978-90-5662-738-6.
  4. ↑ http://www.imaionline-katalog.de/servlet/fc?oid=104000&script=t&col=117281&p=1&srid=117281&c=1&r=1000&f=200&mf=1&lng=de&button=&order=name&JServSessionIdroot=atk0nw7lo1&lb=0&wacc_cmd=imageprocessing.1&c=1&imp_type=3
  5. ↑ Victory Park, Dallas
  6. ↑ BBC Big Screen Manchester
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Paul Wells, Johnny Hardstaff (2008). Re-Imagining Animation: The Changing Face of the Moving Image. Lausanne: AVA Academia. p. 64. ISBN 2940373698.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 http://www.imaionline-katalog.de/servlet/collectioning?r=1000&infolder=&p=1&lb=0&col=0&po=1&oid=0&order=name&simpleValue=thyes&searchfolder=&button=startsearch&useframeset=false&f=200&mf=1&c=1&script=t&lng=de
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Christoph Kronhagel (2010). Mediatektur. Wien New York: Springer-Verlag. pp. 178–179. ISBN 978-3-7091-0302-9.
  10. ↑ Katrin Weber, cite catalogue: Ostrale'013 - we cross the Rubicon. 2013. Dresden
  11. ↑ http://davis-museum-artblog.blogspot.de/2012/01/myriam-thyes-glasgow-styles-magnify.html
  12. ↑ Michael Staab (2012). Myriam Thyes – Glasgow Styles / Magnify Malta by Kunstverein Duisburg. Heidelberg: Kehrer Artbooks. ISBN 978-3-86828-276-4.
  13. ↑ Malcolm Dickson (2012). Myriam Thyes – Glasgow Styles / Magnify Malta by Kunstverein Duisburg. Heidelberg: Kehrer Artbooks. ISBN 978-3-86828-276-4.
  14. ↑ "Politics, Kuenstlerhaus Dortmund".
  15. ↑ "Myriam Thyes at Kunstverein Rhein-Sieg".
  16. ↑ "Songs of the Swamp, Kunsthalle Exnergasse".
  17. ↑ "Connect, Shedhalle Zurich".
  18. ↑ "Myriam Thyes at Kunstverein Duisburg".
  19. ↑ "Images against Darkness". inter media art institute. Retrieved 31 January 2014.
  20. ↑ "Share Prize 2013, Turin".
  21. ↑ http://www.kuenstlerbund.de/english/projects/video-archive/the-video-archive/index.html Deutscher Künstlerbund. Retrieved 3 February 2014.
  22. ↑ http://opac.nebis.ch/F/64EMALUNKNEBSU9XP5SKTBTEK5DGFAKC1GPIVXNNSI9U396JAB-00429?func=full-set-set&set_number=018971&set_entry=000001&format=999
  23. ↑ http://www.digicult.it/news/connect-art-between-media-and-reality/
  24. ↑ http://opac.nebis.ch/F/64EMALUNKNEBSU9XP5SKTBTEK5DGFAKC1GPIVXNNSI9U396JAB-00432?func=full-set-set&set_number=018971&set_entry=000002&format=999
  25. ↑ Deutsche Video-Kunst 2002-2004, ISBN 3-924790-69-8

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