Annette Kelm Reading a Book about Robert Stacy-Judd, 2006
The body of work depicts a room with large ornaments on the wall in Aztec-Mayan style and with various pieces of furniture, a sofa, armchairs, tables and chairs and a sideboard on which two traditional stringed instruments are placed. The room is filled with natural light.
A woman can be seen from behind sitting on the sofa, absorbed in a book. She is wearing a straw hat with a distinctive brim, with the ends of the straw sticking out.
The title, Reading a Book about Robert Stacey-Judd, suggests that the book that the person in the image is reading maybe about the British-born architect and writer Robert Stacey-Judd. The surroundings, with their distinctive forms, give another clue, as Stacey-Judd famously worked with neo-Mayan stylistic elements.
Stacey-Judd moved to Los Angeles, California in late 1922, where he remained for the duration of his career. After coming to Los Angeles, he designed churches as well as theaters, hotels, and other commercial buildings in the style of Mayan Revival architecture, which he helped popularize in the 1920s and 1930s. Stacy-Judd's stylistic synthesis of elements from Mayan architecture, Aztec architecture, and Art Deco set standards in the development of this style.
Stacy-Judd's passion for the cultures of ancient Mesoamerica was also reflected in his writing. In 1934, after his first expedition to the Yucatán in 1930, he published an extensive travelogue, detailing both the archaeological remains of the ancient Maya and their modern descendants. The Maya, whom he regarded as descendants of the inhabitants of the mythical and legendary Atlantis, also played a central role in Stacy-Judd's best-known book, Atlantis - Mother of Empires, published in 1939.
In this picture it remains unclear where the picture was taken, either in a museum or in some other seemingly public space. An aspect that is firmly anchored in Annette Kelm's pictorial worlds - signs and motifs are recognizable, but what they want to show remains deliberately open.
Kelm's fundamental gesture is to insist that there is more to the world of things she captures than the objects themselves.
As in previous series, she is interested in the cultural, historical, or scientific aspects of objects in our society.