Apron Dress

In her artistic work Mia Unverzagt studies the ordinary facets of our daily lives, which, trough her manner of presentation, show disconerting dimensions. Her photos focus on a normality that seems to be both ponderous yet also disturbing.

In this paradox her project „Kittelschürzen“ (apron dress) integrates schemes of „ homegenous incomatibility“: A woman of unknown age and social background stands in an emty room, Her appearance is modest: brown hair at average length combed to the left, short sleeved sweater, apron dress, sometimes a skirt underneath the the apron and sandals. She stares into nothingness. Her appearence changes in nuances from picture to picture, but remains the same in a uncanny way ; at the same time her appearance drowns in an almost vague context. The protagonist seems somehow parked, without any Archimedic point, put there by accident. She conveys a strange mix of melancholy and helplessness. Her enviroment is a sort of no man's land, we get the feeling of an empty room in an abandoned building. That's when we notice the tone of affinity between walpaper and apron dress.

Somehow the woman seems despondet . She doesn't radiate the powerful aura of an active housewife: she clings to her apron, she stares motionless trough the window, she turns her back to us , she moves her arm aimlessly, she stands leaning against the wall and on two occasions she is integrated into another photograph hanging on the wall, where we find her at the same distance, almost absent.

Why is the woman so impassive? Is she, in her apron dress, part of her own background ? Is she taking part in a metamorphosis that transforms her from a three-dimensional human into a two-dimensional wallpaper ? This is what the picture seems to suggest. The human individual is minimized into a picture. Inside an empty room the human as a subject turns into a object. What is left to look at the objectified housewife in her apron dress? Is this the price of beeing a housewife, to fade away like an „anachronistic, floral subject“ into an „amorphic, floral enviroment“? A woman lost in the kitchen? After a multitiude of spectatcular presentations of narrative and associative art, Mia Unverzagt's „apron dress“ again asks questions without giving answers. Her pictures aren't irreducible matters of a speechless view, they are impulses for a vivid and open perception and culture of argumentation. They are impulses to a broader thinking an with that bound to enlightment. Or „cum grano salis“ in the words of Pablo Picasso: „We all know art isn't truth. Art is a lie that teaches us truth, at least the truth we as humans are capable of understanding.“

Prof. Dr. Hartmut Wagner