Turning

Mirror projections

Notes on Paysage avec Poussin / How to work live better

Isabelle Cornaro: PAYSAGE AVEC POUSSIN, South London Gallery

"... to reconstruct an image that you see firstly from a frontal point of view (as an image) and then when you go through it, the scene deconstructs itself and you have other points of view that are created.
There is a sort of cinematographic aspect in the fact that you can walk through the installation ...
I film in a very small scale. Objects are displayed either as landscapes or as categories.
It is a very simple film grammar, it's a question of point of view ... and somehow the editing reconstructs the walk we may make through this installation." (IC)

"These tableaux, which could be described as physical representations of the act of watching, activate specific viewpoints reminiscent of cinematic and editing techniques (framing, focus, close-up, wide-angle, tracking, sequence-shot etc.)" spikeisland.org.uk

**Despite the lyrical potential of objects and materials - the oceanic swirls of a glass paperweight; dusty pink marble blocks and vintage cosmetics - the camera's lens remains coolly analytical; cutting/duration of shots, and compositional/lighting experiments seem systematic. An understated and elegant taxonomy.

***

Anita Witek: HOW TO WORK LIVE BETTER, l'étrangère

"In the depths of the interlocking spaces, the eye seeks in vain for an image background..." Christa Benzer, Soft Filter with Sharp Edges, anitawitek.net

"The act of cutting is as much about producing content as it is about erasing content. In my method I am constantly layering paper so there is never a complete void. There will always be something to break the fall." (AW)

**Photomontages flattened back into a single graphic surface, but the layers of paper with their roughly cut or torn edges remain tactile, tantalisingly so.

Traces of hand-cutting, the sense of multiple and shifting scales, the (re-)assembling of spaces, furniture and décor is like an architectural modelling, set design for an animation perhaps.

Pairs or series of near-identical compositions create an oscillating, agitated movement back and forth ("the eye finds no resting point").
Incremental changes as between frames of a film strip.

No-one Lives in the Real World

Opening

Small crystals series (colour)

Small crystals series (black and white)

Working on this scale seems to make more sense than the previous (A2) collages, arranging and re-arranging shards of paper until they coalesce into a new form small enough to fit into the palm of a hand. Looking as I work for a sense of 'glassiness', if that is possible from paper, some layerings suggesting reflectivity, translucency more than others...

Having left and returned to unstuck works in progress, edges have begun to curl away from their grounds creating slight shadows and hints of three-dimensionality. A next step, then, may be to make these as reliefs in card...


***

Even before the end of the war, in 1917, Taut began to work on his first "glass fantasies." By 1918 they had grown into a portfolio of drawings, which was published the following year under the title Alpine Architektur. In these wonderfully lyrical renderings crystalline configurations spread over entire mountain valleys and chains. Here glass was no longer merely a thin, water-clear skin that helped dematerialise architecture or integrate interior and exterior; it was crystalline, cut like gems, shone with noble brilliance, and was charged with all the symbolism of a romantic medievalism.
- Christian W. Thomsen, Visionary Architecture, p.82