The artist Melanie Ebenhoch works with a variety of materials and techniques. Alongside posters and paintings, the exhibition … of bread, wine, cars, security and peace also presents her sculpture Hotel, a small house made of ceramic. The sculpture was inspired by a book from US-American author Stephen King, whose story is set in a huge, spooky hotel – Melanie, however, transformed it into a miniature house, which serves as a vase full of red carnations. These red carnations are not only a symbol of the workers movement and carried at demonstrations since the late nineteenth century, they are also emblematic of the struggle of women for equal rights. So it is no coincidence that our exhibition opening took place precisely on March 8, 2020 – International Women’s Day.
In her work, Melanie often reflects on the representation of women in art and the film industry. But she is also interested in exceptional buildings or strange landscapes and makes, for example, big fireplace sculptures, in which she places paintings where the fire usually is. She is particularly fascinated by the interplay between the inside and outside of a place or an artwork. Some of her works have figures or pairs of eyes staring right back at us – in this way, Melanie makes our own gaze at the artwork and our role as spectators a central topic.
As our artist workshop, unfortunately, cannot take place at Kunsthalle Wien as planned, Melanie has designed a fantastic dream hotel paper theater, which now you can build yourself! Print out the required parts on a printer at home, then paint them and put them together.
Imagine a place, a hotel, a garden in which dreaming and wishing is particularly easy. What does it look like there and who stays there at night? How do you wander through the crazy labyrinth of bushes and wishing trees, and what do you experience along the way?
Watch this video to find out how to build your own dream hotel paper theater:
You are going to need
• an empty corn flakes box measuring 24 ×2 cm
• scissors
• a ruler
• colored pencils, crayons, or watercolors for painting
• glue
• a thicker type of printer paper (ideally 200 g/m2)
And here we go!
• Download our template for the dream hotel paper theater and print out the paper model sheets at 100% scale on the thicker paper. The images on the sheets are coordinated with the measurements of the corn flakes box.
• Color in the sheets as you like! Then cut them out and fold them along the dotted lines.
• Next, we need to cut a window in the front side of the box: measure a 1.5 cm frame along all four sides, draw it in, and cut it out.
• Glue sheet no. 1 (the sun in the background) on the back wall inside the box.
• Then glue in the next layers – the hotel, the garden with the arch of roses, then the bushes – from back to front. Now glue the frame (sheet no. 5) onto the front of the • box. Your dream hotel is finished – now enjoy the view!
We are curious how your dream hotel turns out and what kind of dreams you have there!
Please send us a photo, and maybe along with a short story, to vermittlung@kunsthallewien.at
… or post them on Instagram #spaceforkids #traumhotelmitwunschgarten #kunsthallewien #ofbread
… or post them in our Facebook group /KunsthalleWienKinderworkshop