1607_short engl
Recognition occurs when external reality touches the mental construct that our perception forms from it. Art has the capacity to perceive this contact as space, to penetrate it, to render it visible, to shape it.
(I observe the space, shut my eyes briefly, and look at the space afresh. If anything has changed could it be ascertained with certainty whether in the space or in my view of the space? Furthermore: if nothing appears to have changed, where does this consistency stem from? Is it a quality of the space or the product of my own perception?)
(Saccades: rapid involuntary movements of the eye between fixation points. This causes light to keep falling on new receptors, preventing them from growing accustomed to consistent stimulation. As experiments show, when a head is held in position and eye movement prevented the result is temporary blindness. The capacity to recognise requires movement! …)
My work engages with the conditions and possibilities of recognition, memory, perception, and so with issues of participation. I pursue many approaches in doing this that are interlinked with one another on a conceptual level. The common denominator is the overlapping of versions of perception. This is usually combined with multi-stage production processes that remain clearly legible. The aspect of spatialization is another result of this basic idea.
The works begin with photographs, quotations, casts of givens in the working, popular cultural everyday and spatial environment. The approach I select for the overlaying of different versions of an image frequently produces results that defy imagination and memory.
( ... Folds: Folding is spatialization, a multiplication of possible perceptions. Folds are the result of an event, and manifestations of its memory. Folds are language and text when the unfolded media are sounds and letters, so folds are always only an inside, not an outside. Even as (most immediate and most valid) documentation, the fold behaves as if it were not, as if any assertion of objectivity were alien to it.)
Photographs
In a project ongoing since 2011, I am extending the topus of multiple exposure photography by adding an inverted, also back-to-front or reflected, double — referencing the concept of the film negative, and in an exclusively analogue process. The superimposed double introduces a moment of alienation into the space, its textures are overwritten with itself. Volumes, spaces and sensory apparatuses are inscribed in one another, the individual in it is thrown back on themself.
This kind of overlap, in particular, not only reminds the recipient of the prerequisites of the medium but also subsequently alludes to all of the other factors and elements involved in the process of perception: light, subject, camera, film — but also: eyeball, optic nerve, brain.
room-fold
In the room-folds I fold large format photographs of rooms. These works operate with the notion of being able to unpeel the immaterial depiction hovering within, leaving it to its own physicality — as well as to the force of gravity. To this extent the conception of these processes is, from the outset, based both on a direct depiction of external reality as well as the intellectual construct of this image.
Projecting, large format depictions of walls and folds in images that show corners mimic the original room, adding an irritant to the sense of space. The size of the works as well as the resistance the material must have offered to the folds possess a physically impressive immediacy.
text-web
Text is a composition of characters in space. When one folds text, it calls categories of space to mind: where is something positioned, what is in its immediate vicinity, on its back …but also: what is created when one rearranges the characters.
Vienna, July 2016
Translation by Jonathan L. Quinn Jacobs