Berlin
DIANE MEYER
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Diane Meyer’s Berlin series is a poignant exploration of the lingering presence of the Berlin Wall, decades after its fall. The series traces the 96-mile path of the former Wall through 50 hand-stitched artworks, capturing landscapes where its physical remnants have vanished but its psychological imprint endures. By overlaying her photographs with cross-stitch patterns that mimic digital pixelation, she creates a visual metaphor for memory’s fragility and the distortion of historical narratives over time. This meticulous process not only resurrects the Wall’s ghostly silhouette within contemporary settings but also invites viewers to reflect on the ways collective memory is constructed, preserved, and altered. Meyer’s work stands as a testament to the enduring impact of geopolitical divisions and the complex interplay between history, memory, and identity.
“In the past few years, I have been working on a completed series of 43 hand-sewn photographs taken along the entire roughly 100 mile path of the former Berlin Wall. Sections of the photographs have been obscured by cross-stitch embroidery sewn directly into the photograph.
The embroidery is made to resemble pixels and borrows the visual language of digital imaging in an analog, tactile process. In many images, the embroidered sections represent the exact scale and location of the former Wall offering a pixelated view of what lies behind. In this way, the embroidery appears as a translucent trace in the landscape of something that no longer exists but is a weight on history and memory. By using the embroidery in a way that is reminiscent of pixels, a connection is being made between forgetting and file corruption.
The images were taken in the city center as well as the outskirts of city where I followed the former path of the wall through suburbs and forests. I was particularly interested in photographing locations where no visible traces of the actual wall remain but where one can still see subtle clues of its previous existence. These clues include incongruities in the architecture that occurred as new structures were built on newly opened land parcels, changes in streetlights, or newer vegetation. Often the embroidered sections of the image run along the horizon line forming an unnatural separation that blocks the viewer.”
— Diane Meyer, 2022
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Diane’s work is in the permanent collections of the George Eastman Museum, the Clarinda Carnegie Museum, the Hood Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, the University of Maryland and more.
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Diane Meyer CV
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