Throughout the world, even in our interconnected digital age, the phonebook continues to be a pervasive record of people, businesses and contact details. As an artifact of the analog age they are most frequently discarded and forgotten, yet for the Swiss artist Viviane Rombaldi Seppey, the phonebook is a fascinating relic that intrinsically embodies place, culture and society. Having predominantly lived abroad as an expatriate in the East as well as the West, the phonebook was always a point of reference for Rombaldi Seppey and therefore it has become one of the main media in her narrative of belonging.

At Context Art Miami 2015 Dubner Moderne will be exhibiting a solo exhibition, entitled Off Listing, of collages by Rombaldi Seppey that repurpose the phonebook in three distinct series of works. Her decidedly minimalistic, subtle isolation and concentration of discreet elements in "Numbers" results in obsessive matrixes of separate numbers ascending into a wall of numerological repetition reminiscent of coding and digitalization. In "My Alphabet" she isolates the alphabet by confining it to individual pages employing the initial signifier but marked by the cut out absence of the ink that once made them records of significance. Having reduced the annals of modern life to their discreet representations and emptinesses, they are then joined in the artist's visual associations of place in "Belonging" in which places half remembered and half forgotten are allowed to emerge.

Born in Sion, Switzerland, Viviane Rombaldi Seppey, has a MFA from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology at LASALLE-SIA, College of the Arts Singapore and has exhibited extensively throughout the USA and Australia.

For further information, please contact Dubner Moderne

Biographie de Viviane Rombaldi Seppey