Solo Exhibition Review "Dismantled Acts," Ferenczy Museum Szentendre, Budapest, February 18, 2016.

"Bear in mind that the root of the Latin origin of “humiliate” is “humus,” i.e. the ground: to humiliate someone is to bring them down to the ground, to trample them in the mud. So this is how the nymphs of the Rhine treat miserable, ugly, love-hungry Alberich, and Madeline Stillwell — who also performs his role, as she rolls about in the mud, the filth of Alberich’s mortification, which is also the mud of the construction site, as well as of her own performance.

...Nobody likes to be treated like a bag of dirt.

...Considering that according to Environmental Science & Technology, the publication of the American Chemical Society, millions of dollars’ worth of gold could be extracted annually, with the appropriate technology, from the sludge of industrial and public sewage in every major city, we must acknowledge that the solution suggested by Madeline Stillwell/Alberich, wherein the yellow mud—or should I say, shit—is turned into gold, is not all that far-fetched.

...Freud reportedly experienced his expeditions into the psyche, like so many descents into the dark netherworld of the unconscious, as a journey into the belly of a mountain, where he was just as likely to find gold as filth and mud."

A Video Portrait and Interview with Madeline Stillwell, co-edited by Marjorie Brunet Plaza and Vidit Studio Berlin

Exhibition Review
Written by: Louisa Elderton

Exhibition Review of Group Exhibition
Widewalls Magazine
Written by: Lorenzo Pereira

Other People's Pixels Blog. September 2013.

"American artist Madeline Stillwell improvises with intention in her site-specific performances. She uses her body as a drawing tool, alternately struggling against and collaborating with found construction materials and trash that she collects onsite. Her physical actions become metaphors for human experiences—breaking through barriers, climbing the walls, emerging from the rubble, rolling around in the muck, untangling oneself—making marks as she literally and figuratively works through each space."

Berlin Art Link. Article. July 21, 2011.

If you can manipulate clay and end up with art, you can manipulate yourself in it as well. It has to do with using the body as a tool, an object to manipulate. – Bruce Nauman

"Stillwell’s performances contain a tension between control and chaos, specifically, of pushing elements to the edge of chaos and then reining them in. If something unplanned occurs, she explores it and somehow incorporates it into the piece, much in the vein of Jackson Pollock’s assertion that “there is no accident.” Similarly, there is a precision in Stillwell's placement of debris and her selection of materials inside the gallery. During her performances, the originally ordered space becomes more chaotic, but it is an ordered chaos because of the consciousness the artist brings to it. Likewise, through presenting the dynamism of building and taking apart structures, she signals the constance of change and our simultaneous propensity for continuous creation and destruction."

Kindle Editions, 2011.

"Madeline Stillwell literally plays out the metaphor of the body trapped in a culture of excess. Stillwell slithers, crawls, twirls, drowns herself in and propels herself through piles of discarded building materials. Like a spider equally part of and author of his web, the artist is material and medium in her performance piece. The work is an illustration of what Rajchman would define as: 'one’s Photographic presence incorporated into a work that attempts to disturb the general or constructed sense of self. The parodic, ironic, or ‘simulacra’ repetitions of words, situations, gestures, or images in experience include a sense of their contingency.' In this light, Stillwell creates an oxymoronic statement—a meta-postmodernist piece."

Berlin Art Link. Exhibition & Performance Review. September 17, 2011.

"Stillwell’s performance threatens to wreck the gallery, herself, and even the spectator. Safety does not seem guaranteed to anyone or anything present. Her performance style is camp as she physically destroys the austerity of her white cube and manages to have the same effect on the atmosphere of the gallery. She launches on about sculpture, about how she is supposed to be making one but how does one make a sculpture when they are the sculpture? A horn honks outside the gallery and Stillwell, masterfully improvising, takes this sign as a response to her question. 'Yes, turbulence, frustration…' It seems for Stillwell its all about the struggle of finding potential answers to open questions. What is sculpture in 2011 and how do we approach it? She may not have the answers but she knows its hard work, really hard work. Stillwell lives the artist’s struggle and at once makes fun of it. Pausing in a particularly awkward position she finds herself in while emerging from the box she exclaims, 'Someone take a picture already! I’ve been training for this!'. . ."

Centre Culturel Colombier, Rennes, FR, January 2011

“I work with setting up structure, using that structure to move myself through, and having that structure become a barrier. I’m talking about the internal limitations or barriers, that have a relationship with the external ones: the ones that are given to us from life or that we find, verses the ones we create or impose on ourselves psychologically.”

Arts & Culture, September 29-Oct 7 2010

"Madeline Stillwell’s videos are of herself locked in mock-heroic battle with piles of architectural debris. It’s a mix of acrobatics, dance and slow-motion Hollywood disaster scene as the artist—done up as a trash-picking Tarzan—rolls on the floor amidst broken windows, plywood, dropcloths, ropes and plaster debris. The piece could stand in contrast to the great guerilla feminist performance artist Valie Export, who had to be quite nervy when doing things like walking into a full Munich art-house theater in crotchless pants and encouraging people to look at her. Stillwell’s piece is almost a parody of Export, and kind of pitiful, perhaps purposefully so. But still it manages to feel oddly grand and mythic."

Wilde Gallery, May 2009

"Madeline Stillwell becomes an extension of her surroundings, exploring the actual and metaphoric limitations wrought by excessive and abrasive materiality. The artist's negotiations of hidden and perilous conduits along jagged planes of urban waste attest to ephemeral states within the urban sphere, while alluding to broader issues of endurance, persistence, and survival within our collective consciousness. The contemporary mythologies that manifest, as she places herself within the urban landscape's broken artifacts, testify to the unexpected hardships and crises that punctuate our lives and serve to threaten our very existence. And yet, her work insists that beauty lingers in even the most primitive or potentially harmful of places."

Featured Artist, Rack Room, May 2010

AFH: "Can you talk about the aspect of pain in your work?
MS: I am classical by nature. So the pain, the dangerous materials, and my attraction to refuse adds a necessary tension to the work. But another reason that I am going through something painful is to raise the question: When do we not have pain?
AFH: Sadly, a very valid question.
MS: Even emotionally its true. There are times when you have to wait for ages. Or you might feel stuck in your life. Whatever it is. There are certain times when you need to use your resources and find the elements within your situation to make useful. The materials that I use then become those elements for me."

Interview with the Artist

Art Blog, March 2010

"Madeline Stillwell's Untitled, Photoshoot II is kind of a new cyber take on Carolee Schneeman's 1967 Body Collage. And by cyber i mean using old clunky office computers and keyboards, kind of like the Japanese cult Tetsuo. The Iron Man meets 3rd wave feminism?"

Culture Section, January 2009

"Digging through the waste that she collects for her performances, Stillwell's ambient movement through her installation at .HBC left the audience free to come and go, while freaking them out as well. For instance, the slow appearance of a hand or leg, delicately, blindly feeling its way out of the debris.
The owners of the building, the W.B.M.--famous in the 90's for their helpful policy towards Berlin-Mitte artists, forced the curators to take down the "trash in the window" after a few days, not knowing it was an artist's installation. After years of successfully using art's potential for gentrification, they now value it only as window decoration masking their dysfunctional technocratic economics.
Nonetheless a video of Stillwell's work remained in the window, prominently filling the space with the memory of the stuff and the performance that had previously taken place there, despite its absence."

Features, December 10, 2008

"Among the dozens of international art fairs dotting the map today, the quality of the art might vary, but one song remains the same at each: the sound of rich people who want you to overhear their declarations. But the first art I came across at the Miami Art Fairs was an elegantly painful performance by artist Madeline Stillwell. Within seconds, the woman beside me intoned: 'I believe it's articulated. Is it articulated?'
Curiosity and social courtesy led me to interrogate her: 'Excuse me? Articulated?' She was ready: 'Is it a robot?' Awesome. It was as if she was unable to conceive of a piece of art that wasn't an object, that couldn't be bought."

Kunst & Kultur, Oktober 31, 2008

(translated text) "The rooms of the building are still impregnated with a spirit of the Berlin Regional Finance Directorate, who last resided here. The U.S. artist Madeline Stillwell has made the most of it: in a chamber she arranged the remaining office telephones, forgotten documents, and herself--with the beautifully appropriate title, Excessive Room Service."

Reviews, January 2010.

Contemporary Art Blog. February 2009.

Art Blog, February 2011

Arts & Literature Review: 2011.

Art Fair Review: October 2010.

Visions of Art, 2010.

Danish Art Blog, September 2010.

De_Seorae, 2010.

Arts Review: June 13, 2008.