Things that Appear and Disappear

For my final Open Studios at the Rijksakademie in 1995 I made a series of works thematically joined by time and the ephemeral, where they were inaccessibly located and impossible to touch. I was exploring how objects relate to becoming images – representation, and how seeing – as an action by the viewer – can therefore create something like a film in the head.

I had been experimenting with developing b/w photos in the darkroom on huge rolls of paper and not using negatives, but photocopies etc. I made prints from images of a kangaroo, an astronaut, a horse; titling the works ‘things that appear and disappear’.

They were installed in wrecked unused buildings on the Rijksakademie site, and could only be accessed from looking through a hole or window. It was December and I erected a vast christmas tree in my studio which I kept locked and which could only be seen from one of the glass corridors above. I used the tree as an exhibition venue and dressed it with my studio works, which were all very small, and in essence stayed invisible although they were on show.

This large scale photographic work was afterwards included in ‘Shaken not Stirred’ by Thomas Seelig at La Machine à Eau in Mons, Belgium and touring to Paris, Torino, Berlin.

Date

1996

Curator

Thomas Seelig

The European Commission (DGX – programme Kaleidoscope and DGV – FSE-Article 6)

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