Recorded
Artist Talk: Sif Itona Westerberg in Conversation with Curator Stephanie Cristello
Recorded on February 16, 2024
Copenhagen-based artist Sif Itona Westerberg and curator Stephanie Cristello discuss the latest iteration of the Driehaus Museum’s contemporary art series, A Tale of Today || Sif Itona Westerberg:Twin Flame, Double Ruin. Examining the dominant presence of twins in origin stories—a primordial belief in the symmetry, doubling, and inversion used to convey the creation of our world—this talk will trace Westerberg’s intervention across the Museum’s first and second floor galleries. Informed by Classical statuary and ancient mythology, the artist’s carved friezes and bronze sculptures compose a language of metamorphosis and hybrid forms where the human body, animals, and plants coalesce. The two will discuss the artist’s approach to sculpture, where common industrial building materials such as aerated concrete are transformed into delicate engraved surfaces reminiscent of marble bas reliefs, in relation to the Gilded Age architecture and ornamentation of the Nickerson Mansion.