Wunderkammer

A collection of temporary concepts, ideas, and physical materials, including light, that presents the viewer with a whole work that may (must?) be broken down into smaller and smaller parts.

"Wunderkammer" at Kinetica Art Fair 2014.
“Wunderkammer” at Kinetica Art Fair 2014.

It has a shattered narrative; a broken temporal and physical state that is both animated and still at the same time.

Each part of the whole using video mapping in different ways to bring stories, moments, and concepts to life.  Some elements are purely aesthetic, aiming to create an deep emotional connection with the viewer, others are more playful and/or conceptual.  They play with our perceptions of time (capturing a static moment but its visual elements still being animated – a key presentational motif that I use in quite a lot of pieces), and our forceful desire to bend nature to our will, quantised and quantified – the imposition of the binary digital on the inherently analogue.
 
It includes one of my stone/video sculptures (a symbiotic digital/physical work), real loaves of bread eating themselves from the inside out, the pair of figures that are called “The Devil’s Mother” (there’s very little mention of such a character that I could find, so I wondered if he would have turned out so bad with some maternal guidance, symbolised by the nice, woolly jumper), and a small segment of my Tate Modern performance – the artist mapped back into his own work!
 

The sculpture was created on-site and then video added on using my Painting With Light software.

The wall text that is displayed alongside the work:

This is a video sculpture: physical objects, both found and constructed, overlaid with video that has been manipulated with software to precisely match the physical shape, creating a symbiotic artwork.

This installation can be taken as a whole and as a mini-exhibition of new and previous works.

It’s structure is arranged roughly following a line from the center of Earth into space: core, earth/water, surface, air, and space.

A key theme of the work is impermanence; both in the materials used (cardboard, light, software), and the uneasy relationship humankind has to our home.

Because of the transitory nature of the materials and construction, this work may also be considered as performance, which is alluded to by the inclusion of a scaled version of a previous performance, including the artist of the piece, now mapped back into his own work.



Discover more from Alex May

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.


Posted

in

by

Tags: