Silvie Vondřejcová (1976) graduated from the Studio of Glass in Architecture led by Marián Karel at the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague. In spite of that, she was more interested, already during her studies, in performance and investigation of herself, her limits and her immediate surroundings. She made the last large spatial object The Story of a Flat in 2001. It contains a topic that later became fundamental for Silvie and that made her abandon three-dimensionality. Through the use of various distribution of furniture The Story of a Flat represents the transformation of a flat where a family that is falling apart lives. In another project Limitation (2002), inspired by Tehching Hsieh performances and implemented at her school stay on Rhode Island School of Design, she creates barriers for herself in which she spends an entire day. Today I will not walk fast, I will not speak and I will not sit! She based her thesis work on Limitation giving it the same name in Czech Omezení (2003), where for the period of six months she prohibited herself once a month to speak, sleep at home, write, sit, etc.
Silvie gradually seizes to examine herself and starts to subject us – her viewers – to the process of question and doubt. In her project Questionnaire (Dotazník) (2004) she asks us how we would like to have been born if we could not choose all the fortune that we received just by being born here and now. Three years later she asks us in Questions (Otázky, 2007) from Artwall what we think our child should be like.
An essential breaking point in the work of Silvie Vondřejcová came, however, after she finished her studies. Out of fear of becoming a part of the working process and not having time for art, she made a rule for herself that everyday she’d have to draw a part of a certain whole. It was the beginning of a daily performance documented by a small square drawing from one day called Calendars (2004-present). The drawing always has a date and time of origin on the back. That citation of Apellés “not a day without a line drawn”, which is currently being used so often, has materialized in Silvia’s case in 12 years and 12 thematic cycles that so far include over 4300 drawings.
Fundamental topics of Silvie’s work include the yearly cycle, examining ordinary moments, capturing transformations in time and their rituals. She records the most ordinary transformations when the sun creates a shadow of a plant in Shadows (Stíny) 2013, or when it rises on the sky – from spring to winter in Calendars, 2005, from the morning to the evening in Sky above the Chimney (Nebe nad komínem), 2010. Or she takes pictures of places in Journeys to Work (Cesty do práce), 2004.
Systematicness, personal life and experiences, when unnoticed everydayness and the urgency to abandon our seeming troubles and devote our time to what is actually happening around us, intermesh and generalize in the mechanism of concepts of her work. To contemplate whether the sun is still setting behind the blacksmith shop, whether the world has changed while I go to work every day, whether I still know what and how is happening and transforming around me.
