Transcending Space
By Zhanna Veyts
In today’s global climate, the notion of space, as delineated by boundaries and organized by mediating parties, is of critical importance for governing bodies and individual transgressors alike. Artists, being at the forefront of civilized transgression, can transcend these boundaries. As mediums converge and territories overlap, leagues of artists aim to carve out new terrain for their projects in the visual imagination, and in turn the very definition of space requires renegotiation.
Katrin Sigurdardottir reconsiders spatial boundaries by fluctuating their scale. She inverts our notion of interiority as "home" and successfully expands our experience of place, and site. Dennis G. Pelli, a Professor of Perception at NYU, teaches observation through perceptual isolation of space in James Turrell’s Skyspace installation at PS1. He uses the formalism of the boundary to zoom in on phenomenon in the ever-changing sky.
Michal Rovner transposes space through digital media and projection. Rovner transcends sculpture’s conventional stasis by featuring slowly migrating forms upon organic surfaces. Her project, a composite of various media melded into conceptual sculpture, breaks down the boundaries and identifiability of her subject into an abstraction of an environment, and its viable origins.
Pravin Sathe interviews video artist Tony Ourseler, who speaks on expanding the space of the canvas into the video medium. Ourseler investigates the media not simply as an artistic medium but as a representation of the psyche itself, and discusses politics and communication as the expanding spaces of media presented by art, a movement highly attested to by the contemporary politico-art climate.
In J. Meejin Yoon’s White Noise/White Light personal space in the city is carved out in a spectacle, a synchrony of light and sound. As viewers interact with the project, they enter a micro-environment of illusory reprieve from Athens’ buzzing urbanity. Similarly, viewers are integrated into the composition of WHERE, a project by six-of-one, which blurs the lines between viewer and work. By calling participants directly into their earth drawings the artists investigate the paradigm of place and dissolve the space between everyday and hyperreality. Fred Tomaselli explores this self-same gap, as his constructions of reality merge with the unreal in a new, transgressive and luminously imaginative pictorial space. This, too, is the domain of Laurie Fendrich, who seeks order and balance in her work by concentrating on integrating the pictorial borders into the composition.
Agnes Denes’ projects aim at integrating the various facets of environments into resounding wholes. David Marcus and Julianne Swartz also investigate communal space in their discussion of her site-specific installation, a project located in the gentrified "skid row" which "turns the tables on a social construct." Here, voices trespass into untrodden territories of power dynamics and human vulnerabilities and reach beyond public propriety to achieve new connections and intimacies. Finally, Tobias Regensburger’s "Camp" is inspired by the independence and freedom embodied in living space as realized by the creative process. His Survival Car is a comment on mobility and escapism as a new dimension to living, though the double entendre of the project’s title underscores a fundamental territoriality.
Be they the spaces of communities, mediums, or images, the artists seemingly share the hope that, above all, it is the space of the viewers imagination that will be expanded and transcend reality.
