SELECTED PRESS AND CURATOR QUOTES

Stolle's approach to exploring the impact of agrichemical companies and our food system is nothing short of groundbreaking. Through her masterful use of collage, text, and installation, she creates thought-provoking artworks that invite viewers to engage critically with the manipulative tactics of corporations like Bayer-Monsanto and Dow Chemical.

By blending archival research with appropriated printed and digital source materials, Stolle successfully surfaces hidden histories and exposes the persistent greenwashing tactics of these powerful entities. Her work invites us to question the language and imagery used to shape public perception and to look beyond the industry propaganda that has long been taken for granted. –Hannah Tisckoff, The Billboard Creative, April 2023

Stolle’s work not only gleans from corporate fields but also plants new ideas for viewers. Art-science work can be thought of in four major categories: conveyance, contributive, contextual, and critical modes.  Stolle’s artworks carry all of these categories. Combined, they offer viewers new discoveries about relationships for which they may have never seen textual evidence. Information is being conveyed through this but so are critical modes with which viewers can approach these details with an understanding of the broader context of corporate connections. This gives rise to the most exciting aspect of Stolle’s work: its potential to contribute new knowledge by bringing together newly formed strands of thought which can form into new narratives for viewers. –Hannah Star Rogers, Curator/Scholar, The Artist in the Archive exhibition essay, August 2022

Stolle’s collage Canola Fields addresses the problem of monocultures and the destructive, deceptive practices of Big Agra and chemical companies. By providing circular apertures through which to view hidden truths, Stolle creates a tension between bleak chemical plants and the fertile farms that underscores the industry’s false narratives. –Michael Rooks, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, September 2021
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Stolle selects to set the tone for a show that is leavened with a certain gallows humour, but which smoulders with indignation at the arrogant machinations of global chemical conglomerates as they work to forestall legal and political redress against their extractive prerogatives. With ‘Pesticide Pop,’ Stolle is foregrounding a discussion that is epochal in its implications; she treats the human consequences of pollution with crystalline lucidity, and the implications of the use of glyphosate-type chemicals for insect populations become obvious as well.  –William Kherbeck, Berlin Artlink, March 2020

The works exhibited at NOME share an effort to document and reveal the inherent contradictions between Bayer-Monsanto public image and the facts, uncovering a history that has been significantly altered to satisfy private interests. They present a counternarrative that reveals the practices concealed by big corporations and engages us in critical thinking and collective discussion…Stolles’s work reminds us that an alternative path to capitalist overgrowth is possible if we switch the focus of our global vision from overproduction and overconsumption toward practices of de-growth.–Vanina Saracino, The Creation of Scarcity, February 2020

Above all, Stolle created this with external stimuli by taking up the visual language of advertising and corporate design, thus making the complex facts accessible and scratching surfaces. In their art, Stolle beats the corporations with their own weapons. –Beate Scheder, Taz Berlin, February 2020

Stolle beautifully perverts Stryker’s infamous “kill” punches, collapsing the comfortable distance between past and present and confronting viewers with what we don’t want to know about where our food comes from. As Stryker fought to narrow the nations’s perceptions of catastrophe, Stolle seeks to expose another catastrophe before it’s too late. –Roula Seikaly, Photograph Magazine, July/August 2019

Sometimes it’s not about the content – the actual data – but the infrastructure. On one side is the forensics of information in general – looking at the data, or the picture, and analyzing it – and on the other is the linguistic instrument – the language. It is not always the content that matters, but how it is framed to manipulate the meaning of that particular thing. In Stolle’s work it’s that of Monsanto Chemical Company’s advertising, which is public information – they were advertising in a major magazine – but she highlights its linguistic manipulation. That’s the secret device that's revealed; or, perhaps it's the complexity of that device. Her technique is to redact, but she uses this redaction to reveal: by blacking out all the unnecessary information, she’s basically underlining what the message actually is. –Paolo Cirio, Curator, Evidentiary Realism, November 2017

Like a ventriloquist with a contrary voice, Kirsten Stolle appropriates secretive practices of redaction, misdirection and sloganeering to shed paradoxical light on media misinformation.  Her primary target is Agricorps and the industrialization of food production, confronting the increasingly florid rhetoric that pushes genetically modified organism into high fashion. With vintage magazines and mid-century print ads as her muse, Stolle skillfully blocks out portions of ad copy to author alternative narratives from the remains:  obscuring sight to craft revealing insight.    –Steven Matijcio, Curator, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio

Kirsten Stolle's collages and installations draw viewers in with their compositions of carefully arranged designs of found images, revealing on closer inspection the sinister contours of post-Cold War formations of the American chemical industry, nuclear weapons proliferation and global military campaigns---the fantasies of American progress embodied in mutations of the natural order.  –Cora Fisher, Curator, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

With the appearance of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) in 1996, the choice of a food source that was presented by technological advancement and discovery brought with it more than a meal dilemma: it presented a question of morality, one that Stolle chose not to ignore.  Portraying her investigation of the issue through artistic means, she has developed a practice that not only opens the conversation on the subject and with a wide audience but does so in a visually stunning way that often sends chills down the spine.             -Lor Dethal, WIDEWALLS

Stolle evidences an inquisitiveness of mind and eagerness to research matters that are economic and ethical with a necessary and measured distance.  --Diana Daniels, Associate Curator, Contemporary Art, Crocker Art Museum

Stolle's work is an explicit critique of what once represented the American dream, the blind faith in progress through science and technology, and the role of business in making profit.  --Karl Volkmar, The New Orleans Art Review

Kirsten Stolle redacts Monsanto advertisement from the late 1940s. By blacking out certain words, and adding collage elements, she reveals the true meanings---according to contemporary standards, of course---of the "organic chemicals" like saccharin that were once considered glamourous or as, in the case of insecticides like DDT or Insect-o-Blitz, even miraculous.  --Dewitt Cheng, artltdmag.com

An ease, maybe a delight in the process, runs through it that communicates itself quite well to the viewer, along with the work's darker insinuations.  --Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle

Stolle's nature lyricism, however, is of the moment: allusive and elusive, complex and multivalent. Inviting viewer participation, they're more psychologically involving and playfully enigmatic. --Dewitt Cheng, art ltd.