​Focus On: ​Melissa Steckbauer
22 January - 20 February 2026
​Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, Austria 
​Images: selection
​Installation Views: Manuel Carreon Lopez

The cadence of shifting from a universality to an individuated experiencing in this reality is that of a seasonally shifting waterfall: awash and overwhelmed by the richness of touches and motion or bare, simple, and slow in isolation. The impetus to reach for an understanding of this living is helpful but also evolutionarily young; it may return us to an understanding of ourselves as a singular vehicle and along with it: ego, trivialities, and an organisation of brain function principally geared toward survival. [Here we arrive at the most boring tropes of money and power.] Often grounded in somatics, a greater symbiosis can come with a big breath in of shared, surfeit being; an unconditional psychic net is thrown over -- or better dragged from under -- an imagined consciousness and an empathy so unwieldy is born of this that any attempt at judgement or the measure of experience and complexity is recognised as a missed-measure upon an unbounded landscape. When recognised for its value as a shared complexity, this brings luminance and resonance, co-, or "with-ness." This non-conditional state is however unsustainable and a return to individuation, solidity, and often grief (or violence) quickly returns. This scaling up or down makes living musical.

– Melissa Steckbauer