Copper, Indigo, Hand, Dust, Arm, Leg
2015
Gallery Raum mit Licht, Vienna
Curated by: Ruth Noack
Installation including:
Copper, Indigo, Hand, Dust, Arm, Leg, series of 36 paintings on paper – gouache with copper leaf, 360 x 460 mm each
Slowing Down: Liquid Territory II, series of 80 graphite drawing on risograph print on paper, 290 x 400 mm each
Vortex Vertigo, wood painted with liquid copper, 45 x 40 x 35 cm
Body rolls from one side of the paper to the other – from bottom to the top. Colour appears in traces, as sediment – dust that settles down evenly, accumulated in one area more and leaving gaps in between – areas of no accumulation. In places colour is solid and stable, and in places we only see a light trace, a colour that is disappearing. There is no floor, no specific place, just paper. Time is stretched, slowed down, almost still. We see pauses in one continuum, the in-betweens, instants that usually slip away from the eye. The sequence examines minutiae, a non-event, the gradual move of a seemingly sleeping body. While there’s an idea of things being slowed, there’s also a sense of ‘real-time’ (think of the small moves a body might make whilst sleeping for many hours). Sleep is increasingly hard to come by, and here its re-presented moment by moment, drawn-out, broken down, pro-longed.
The gouache pieces might in some way circle action – inability to act, refusal to act, immaterial action, inaction, delicate and fragile action, precious and precarious moments that are pre-action. Positioned on the wall so that it reflects a shape of a graph – in places loosing losing its impact or on the other hand gaining it (if reversed as a form). There is a sea of action – economy of fragments – bodies as fragments – floating bodies – migrant bodies. The pieces also reference a number of materials, pigments, colours of a trade, goods that at different points in the history in very different ways influence and impact workers daily rhythms – in free fall – groundless – stateless – liquid.
Formation of copper bars/sticks mimics a vortex, a vertigo. The sticks create a type of architectural structure, support, a large skeleton of drawings, a reef, surplus or a lack, wealth or poverty?
What I have in mind while making these worlds and while thinking how to positioned them in space are processes such as: repercussions, sedimentations, accumulations, history/materiality of particular traded elements/ valuable goods, sea trade/economy, surplus of production. Time within different sequences is stretched, elongated- it creates niches where one can pause, think and register a movement, making of a mark. Each work within the series deals with a similar concern. The time lapse – the slowing down of a movement within a series – accumulation of images, the fragmentation and sedimentation.
In some sense the body of the viewer is choreographed, moved though space in a way that mirrors the body that’s being looked at on the paper. Every step that the viewer makes along a line of frames in a sequence echoes the movement of the figure in the image. Every image that might be looked at is only slightly different from the last (if you looked at series of frames you’d hardly be able to discern where the change actually happens) and so we’re asked to look closely, carefully. The work insists that we continually return to images that are perhaps at first glance the same. The arrangement of different elements in the space is also about position of viewer’s body in the space – it’s never the same.
Slowing Down: Liquid Territory II
2015
Series of 80 graphite drawing on risograph print on paper
290 x 400 mm each
Vortex Vertigo
2015
Wood painted with liquid copper, 45 x 40 x 35 cm