Leandro Erlich
Leandro Erlich’s installations function like traps made from fake mirrors, inversions or trompe l’oeils (a style of painting that gives an illusion of photographic reality) in which the spectator is invited to live out the strange experience of his presence or of his disappearance and to go beyond optical games in order to explore the depths of a psychological reality more disturbing than it appears.
- Extract from the press release for the exhibition, “Notre Histoire”, at the Palais de Tokyo, 2006
See/Learn more here.
Katrin Sigurdardottir
High Plane, 2001-2005, polystyrene, wood, steel.
“A very large white platform is constructed 13 feet off the ground, on top of the trusswork above the exhibition space. It is perforated with two holes and ladders that lead up to them. To view the landscape, the viewers climb the ladders and then can poke their heads through the 2 holes in the platform. Simultaneously they are confronted with each other and their heads become a disproportionate part of the landscape. The scene does not document an exisiting place, all the mountains/ islands are made up”*
[images via katrinsigurdardottir.info]
See/learn more here.
William Hundley
“I think we all share unconscious thoughts, but have learned to experience our lives independently. The lack of identity in my work allows the viewer to place themselves into the imagery or imagines who has been taken out.”*
Andrea Galvani
“L’intelligenza del Male #5”, 2007
“N-1 #1”, 2007
“la Morte di un’immagine #5”, 2005
“la Morte di un’immagine #6”, 2006
“What I question is not only the visual representation of an idea and its meaning but reality itself. I am interested in seeding doubt. I would like to quote from Jean Baudrillard’s “The Perfect Crime”. Here the author describes perfectly the illusory nature of human perception of time and space:
The only objective illusion is a physical truth: no object in this universe co-exists in real time with other objects. There is no correspondence between the sexes, between the stars, nor this glass and the table onto which it sits. Because light travels in space, when we look at an object, we look at it with a certain delay. This is the intrinsic disorder of creation. The absence of things to themselves, the fact that they don’t take place while seeming to, the fact that everything withdraws behind its own appearance and can therefore never be identical to itself, all this is the material illusion of the world. Real time “does not exists as one cannot be completely in the present moment, hence the reality of human beings is always virtual. On the other hand, if we say that in any given moment in time you are in a specific temporal place, you will never be in a moment in time which contains your entire experiences. And this remains at bottom the great enigma, which plunges us into terror, and from which we protect ourselves with the formal illusion of truth.”*
See/Learn more here. I also strongly, strongly suggest you read this incredible interview from which the above excerpt was taken.
Michael Kontopoulos
Machines that Almost Fall Over from Michael Kontopoulos on Vimeo.
“A system of sculptures that is constantly on the brink of collapse. My intention was to capture and sustain the exact moment of impending catastrophe and endlessly repeat it.”*
Inner Forests from Michael Kontopoulos on Vimeo.
“In “Inner Forests”, a user’s shadow is augmented and expanded by the gentle growth of trees and shrubs. The longer the user stands still, the more growth occurs. If the user moves, the growth disappears quickly.
While the notion of augmenting the human form through shadow has been widely explored in new media art, what strikes me often is the frequency with which the expectation of immediate feedback and instant gratification is rewarded. With this piece, I was interested in the concept of slow interactions, interactions that take patience and investment from the user; that develop a personal relationship between the user and their shadow rather than constructs an interface where the shadow is merely a tool.
Slow interaction rewards the user for personal investment over time.”*
See/Learn more here.
