Vanishing Point: case studies
As described by Gilles Deleuze, “The simulacrum implies huge dimensions, depths, and distances that the observer cannot master. It is precisely because he cannot master them that he experiences an impression of resemblance. The simulacrum includes the differential point of view, and the observer becomes part of the simulacrum itself, which is transformed and deformed by his point of view. The mastery of the viewing point is never removed from the nullity of the vanishing point. We often seem to be inside the field of representation, as in a dream or in a hallucination. In many of the pieces we have disappeared down a rabbit hole, only to emerge in a strange wonderland, where inside and outside, viewing and vanishing, have become one.”
Excerpted from an essay by Hal Foster
A key term for the work on display in Vanishing Point is simulacrum. The simulacrum is a copy without an obvious original, a representation without an obvious referent. The first attribute suggests that the simulacrum is bound up in repetition, but it is a distinctive type of repetition that issues less in a series of similar images or objects (as in the boxes of Donald Judd, say) than in a dissimilarity within each image or object that often distorts it.
The second attribute—the attenuating of the referent—suggests that the simulacrum tends towards abstraction. Most simulacra retain a resemblance to the world, however strained it might be. The difference is that the simulacra resemblance does not affirm the reality of the pictured world. Rather it tends to de realize it.
Sabine Hornig
Hornig’s photographs depict anonymous urban streetscapes reflected in the surfaces of empty, equally anonymous storefront windows of the sort typically found in the ground floors of these buildings. Unframed and installed at window height, some of Hornig’s photographs play trompe l’oeil games with our sense of surface and depth because at first glance they may be confused with “real” windows. The glass and screen become reflective veil and urban palimpsest on which traces of the city’s past, present, and future are inscribed only to be immediately replaced with something else. Some of which we see remains permanently situated, like buildings; other elements, like the passing traffic, are present only for a moment and then vanish.
Glass draws our eye through it, even as it reflects our own faces and bodies on its surface. Glass has the power to fragment and dissolve the images that play across it. By confusing spaces that are real, spaces that are reflected, and spaces that are photographed, Hornig asks us to consider the ways in which perception and expectation determine how they see. The translucent materiality of glass in Hornig’s photographs stages the dialectic of materialization and dematerialization through which we apprehend and experience the contemporary city.
Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler
In their film installations and digital photographs, Hubard and Birchler create “looped” scenarios that deconstruct the language of the cinema and the illusory nature if filmic space. Their film projections present an ambiguous narrative situation that at some point imperceptibly doubles back on itself, creating “anti-plots” driven in circles by the force of sheer repetition, all shot from the same vantage point over the course of one day. Each photograph is composed of superimposed layers that appear as if they were a single, seamless image. By manipulating time and space in a manner not unlike that of a film strip, the photographs effectively turn the cinema and its devices inside out, mirroring the film’s ability to compress time and prolong our gaze all at once. In all of their works, time does not flow forward but gets stuck, like a piece of film that has jumped the take up reel. Leaving a frozen image on screen. There is no sense of the present, and no sense of presence either.
Luisa Lambri
She is interested in the ways that architectural space registers internally for its users. Her inscription of place is a subjective and recollective phenomenon, never fully realizable, registering only as a visual echo. Her use of photography as a means of dematerializing space., convey a synaesthetic sense of the body melting into, and being infused with space.
Won Ju Lim
The translucent plexiglass is more like a refractory device that splits and sometimes shatters the projected images, so that they too take on the fractal qualities of the built structures they envelop.
Carla Klein
Carla Klein’s paintings return again and again to the subject of vacancy and emptiness, particularly the kind that characterizes place of transit such as airports, bridges, train or subway stations, and other places trough which people pass on their way to somewhere else. Figure and ground interpenetrate, interior and exterior become indistinguishable The difference between what is solid and what is shadow, what is physically present and what is a reflection, and between positive and negative space becomes equally indistinct.
Unsure of where we stand, we slowly come to understand that the space of the painting and the ambiguous nature of the space it represent are analogous. Through their emptiness, Klein’s spaces stage the disappearance of meaning, leading us to a state of uncertainty and loss of control over our perception of space, rather than an illusory sense of mastery over it.
Edward Ruscha
Ruscha’s Petroplots are clearly meant to function differently than a Thomas guide or travel book. Ghostly lines and street names drift over a terrain that, although totally specific, denies the viewer the information necessary for navigation. To someone who knows LA, however these atmospheric surfaces may trigger all sorts of memories, personal association, and cultural meanings. The Petroplots elevate foreground and background, highlighting the dynamic of specificity and abstraction that characterizes not only all mapmaking, but also Brian Eno’s notion of the ambient and Marc Augé’s concept of the nonplace.
Amelie Von Wulffen
Amelie von Wulffen’s collage paintings construct fantasy architecture based on places she has partly remembered and partly imagines. She combines photographic images with drawing of fragmentary interior spaces, often undoing distinctions between inside and outside. The motif of the fragment appears again and again in her work, both formally ad as an idea.
Corinne Wasmuht
Like a human scanner, Corinne collects images of places she has visited or imagined and files the information away. She later combines different space, places and times in mural-size paintings that look like portals into another dimension. She is particularly interested in the play of light and color emitted from stain glass windows, neon signs, television monitors and computer screens because the color seems to be alive without a physical body. The paintings suggest that the beating, blinking lucent lightscapes characteristic of the contemporary metropolis respond to a very real human desire to see flickers of: life” pulsing around us.
Amy Wheeler
Automobile Oriented cities like Los Angeles offer infinite possibilities for engaging the pleasure of the passive, fleeting glance. The inspiration for the paintings comes from driving around LA’s surface streets at night. The lens of looking from one disembodied space (the empty boutique) from another (the moving automobile) creates a sense of vertigo. Wheeler aims for a rapid flow of paint to surface that mirrors that fleeting traces of a nighttime cityscape in motion.
Carrie Yamaoka
In her book, Megalopolis, Celeste Olalquiaga describes the contemporary city as having a “hologram like aesthetic” where “buildings are seen to disappear behind reflections of the sky or merge into one another.” This endless series of reflection encourages a sense of limitless space, but any sense of physical freedom this may foster is “soon lost to the reproduction ad infinitum of space—a hall of mirrors in which passerby are dizzied into total oblivion. She creates this experience to “psychaesthenia” defined as a state in which the relation between self and surrounding territory is disturbed, where “the space defined by the coordinates of the organism’s own body is confused with represented space.”
Yamaoka’s mercurial works meld opposites; appearing both solid and liquid, reflective and refractive, they dissolve boundaries between painting and sculpture, along with those between the discrete art object and the room-sized installation.
Excerpted from an essay by Hal Foster
A key term for the work on display in Vanishing Point is simulacrum. The simulacrum is a copy without an obvious original, a representation without an obvious referent. The first attribute suggests that the simulacrum is bound up in repetition, but it is a distinctive type of repetition that issues less in a series of similar images or objects (as in the boxes of Donald Judd, say) than in a dissimilarity within each image or object that often distorts it.
The second attribute—the attenuating of the referent—suggests that the simulacrum tends towards abstraction. Most simulacra retain a resemblance to the world, however strained it might be. The difference is that the simulacra resemblance does not affirm the reality of the pictured world. Rather it tends to de realize it.
Sabine Hornig
Hornig’s photographs depict anonymous urban streetscapes reflected in the surfaces of empty, equally anonymous storefront windows of the sort typically found in the ground floors of these buildings. Unframed and installed at window height, some of Hornig’s photographs play trompe l’oeil games with our sense of surface and depth because at first glance they may be confused with “real” windows. The glass and screen become reflective veil and urban palimpsest on which traces of the city’s past, present, and future are inscribed only to be immediately replaced with something else. Some of which we see remains permanently situated, like buildings; other elements, like the passing traffic, are present only for a moment and then vanish.
Glass draws our eye through it, even as it reflects our own faces and bodies on its surface. Glass has the power to fragment and dissolve the images that play across it. By confusing spaces that are real, spaces that are reflected, and spaces that are photographed, Hornig asks us to consider the ways in which perception and expectation determine how they see. The translucent materiality of glass in Hornig’s photographs stages the dialectic of materialization and dematerialization through which we apprehend and experience the contemporary city.
Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler
In their film installations and digital photographs, Hubard and Birchler create “looped” scenarios that deconstruct the language of the cinema and the illusory nature if filmic space. Their film projections present an ambiguous narrative situation that at some point imperceptibly doubles back on itself, creating “anti-plots” driven in circles by the force of sheer repetition, all shot from the same vantage point over the course of one day. Each photograph is composed of superimposed layers that appear as if they were a single, seamless image. By manipulating time and space in a manner not unlike that of a film strip, the photographs effectively turn the cinema and its devices inside out, mirroring the film’s ability to compress time and prolong our gaze all at once. In all of their works, time does not flow forward but gets stuck, like a piece of film that has jumped the take up reel. Leaving a frozen image on screen. There is no sense of the present, and no sense of presence either.
Luisa Lambri
She is interested in the ways that architectural space registers internally for its users. Her inscription of place is a subjective and recollective phenomenon, never fully realizable, registering only as a visual echo. Her use of photography as a means of dematerializing space., convey a synaesthetic sense of the body melting into, and being infused with space.
Won Ju Lim
The translucent plexiglass is more like a refractory device that splits and sometimes shatters the projected images, so that they too take on the fractal qualities of the built structures they envelop.
Carla Klein
Carla Klein’s paintings return again and again to the subject of vacancy and emptiness, particularly the kind that characterizes place of transit such as airports, bridges, train or subway stations, and other places trough which people pass on their way to somewhere else. Figure and ground interpenetrate, interior and exterior become indistinguishable The difference between what is solid and what is shadow, what is physically present and what is a reflection, and between positive and negative space becomes equally indistinct.
Unsure of where we stand, we slowly come to understand that the space of the painting and the ambiguous nature of the space it represent are analogous. Through their emptiness, Klein’s spaces stage the disappearance of meaning, leading us to a state of uncertainty and loss of control over our perception of space, rather than an illusory sense of mastery over it.
Edward Ruscha
Ruscha’s Petroplots are clearly meant to function differently than a Thomas guide or travel book. Ghostly lines and street names drift over a terrain that, although totally specific, denies the viewer the information necessary for navigation. To someone who knows LA, however these atmospheric surfaces may trigger all sorts of memories, personal association, and cultural meanings. The Petroplots elevate foreground and background, highlighting the dynamic of specificity and abstraction that characterizes not only all mapmaking, but also Brian Eno’s notion of the ambient and Marc Augé’s concept of the nonplace.
Amelie Von Wulffen
Amelie von Wulffen’s collage paintings construct fantasy architecture based on places she has partly remembered and partly imagines. She combines photographic images with drawing of fragmentary interior spaces, often undoing distinctions between inside and outside. The motif of the fragment appears again and again in her work, both formally ad as an idea.
Corinne Wasmuht
Like a human scanner, Corinne collects images of places she has visited or imagined and files the information away. She later combines different space, places and times in mural-size paintings that look like portals into another dimension. She is particularly interested in the play of light and color emitted from stain glass windows, neon signs, television monitors and computer screens because the color seems to be alive without a physical body. The paintings suggest that the beating, blinking lucent lightscapes characteristic of the contemporary metropolis respond to a very real human desire to see flickers of: life” pulsing around us.
Amy Wheeler
Automobile Oriented cities like Los Angeles offer infinite possibilities for engaging the pleasure of the passive, fleeting glance. The inspiration for the paintings comes from driving around LA’s surface streets at night. The lens of looking from one disembodied space (the empty boutique) from another (the moving automobile) creates a sense of vertigo. Wheeler aims for a rapid flow of paint to surface that mirrors that fleeting traces of a nighttime cityscape in motion.
Carrie Yamaoka
In her book, Megalopolis, Celeste Olalquiaga describes the contemporary city as having a “hologram like aesthetic” where “buildings are seen to disappear behind reflections of the sky or merge into one another.” This endless series of reflection encourages a sense of limitless space, but any sense of physical freedom this may foster is “soon lost to the reproduction ad infinitum of space—a hall of mirrors in which passerby are dizzied into total oblivion. She creates this experience to “psychaesthenia” defined as a state in which the relation between self and surrounding territory is disturbed, where “the space defined by the coordinates of the organism’s own body is confused with represented space.”
Yamaoka’s mercurial works meld opposites; appearing both solid and liquid, reflective and refractive, they dissolve boundaries between painting and sculpture, along with those between the discrete art object and the room-sized installation.
posted by agnes at 11:39 PM
<< Home