Hornig: perception and imagination

http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artist.php?art_name=Sabine%20Hornig

Excerpt from Tanya Bonakdar Gallery press release

Entitled Out Front, the exhibition is comprised of new sculpture and photographic work, each provoking an enigmatic discourse between viewer and object. Referencing storefront windows and building facades respectively, the photographs and sculptures set up an ambiguous relationship between visual penetration and physical access—placing the viewer simultaneously within and outside of the work's frame. Subverting the Modern dynamic between form and function, Hornig's work releases form to explore the relationship between architecture, perception and imagination.

In the three sculptural works that comprise Out Front, Sabine Hornig presents artifacts of Modernism's transcendence into a functional, global language—a language of migration, identity and ambiguity. The structures that inspire the works are selected primarily for their formal composition, presented by Hornig as remnants of a utility that is now somewhat unclear: a glass storefront, a building entryway, and a bus stop. Relegating these forms to mere symbols of functionality (but without actual function), Hornig's work subverts the enslavement of design to serve efficiency, economics and pragmatism. Instead, Hornig explores the nature of these forms as symbolic architecture, or virtual structures. Flat forms are brought forward, from two dimensions to three, and present a series of unfolding 'fronts' with no 'back' and 'exteriors' without 'interiors.' Non-specific to locality, the structures are as likely culled from a government housing project as the most exclusive city block from Athens to Los Angeles to New York to Berlin. This anonymity is further emphasized by the rough, stuccoed surface of each piece. As if they were cut from the standard concrete building blocks of the generic international city, they further attest to the hegemony and failed Utopian goals of Modernism.

The photographic works are based on empty storefront window facades, presenting reflections of streetscapes and exploiting the storefront window frames as compositional devices. As such, Hornig further displaces form from function, reconfiguring both to create a new relationship between the two. The street reflections are contrasted by the emptiness of the interior space, enhancing the dynamic between interior and exterior. And like the building facades, these storefront windows also explore the membranes that divide space, inside and outside, public and private.

Manipulating the language of Minimalist architecture and Modernist forms, Hornig weaves photography, sculpture and installation into a sequence of environments that provoke a discourse on scale, perception, and memory. Playing with the universality of generic Modernism, Hornig displaces architectural structures and manipulates scale in order to present the representational as abstract.

Perhaps the most ambitious exploration of her multi-media vocabulary, ‘Schule/School’ serves to integrate of the rigorously formal with the poetic narrative. Glass and aluminum foyers and wooden pavilions, modified structures appropriated from a prototype for a German school, function as the main sculptural components of the show. The repetition of this institutional building over and again throughout Germany generates for students an experience that is uncannily universal, and specific, at the same time. The schoolhouse itself is a cultural institution both public and private, describing both a location, and a community. Further, the school brings a particularly interesting dynamic to the exploration of scale and memory. As a small child perceives the world, teachers are taller, rooms are larger, and desks are bigger. This perspective changes when the grown-up student returns, as memory distorts scale and nostalgia functions as a filter for perception.

The glass and aluminum cube in the main gallery represents the version of the structure in an objective state. Here, we can perceive the entire building from outside, as we see the pavilion roof from below, set within the clean white cube of the gallery with its cement floors, its white walls, its bright lights. Of course, this is actually a constructed purity; the clean white-box positioned as unbiased space, a human invention. As the visitor moves from the main space to the smaller, perspective is flipped. The visitor finds their self inside the glass and steel cube that was observed moments before. This larger version of the cube is placed within the reconfigured smaller gallery. Affixed with large format transparencies of a wooded area, it is set within an imaginary forest, emphasizing the 'natural state' as opposed to the white cube. Yet, in the gallery context, this natural state is the foreign environment—the dream, the hallucination. Another pavilion-like roof is visible only through the thick brush of vegetation, its outline illuminated via a series of lights on its underside.

Another large wall seen when exiting the gallery suggests an imaginary view into an empty classroom. Built into this wall, a set of glass windows is affixed with large-format transparencies featuring photographic images of an empty classroom. Presenting an image on the one hand, the windows also function as lenses through which the rest of the architectural space is viewed.