User:Nicole Hametner/reading, writing and research methodologies 2012

Black Light, 2010 WHAT: Description

The work is placed in a gallery with windows to the street, so the pedestrian have an insight during 24 hours. At the first sight there are only big white sheets recognized on the walls, on the ceiling are blacklight tubes replacing the usual neon tubes. While the bright daylight from the windows beside interacts with the artificial, the silk screens printed on the sheets are barely visible. It is not before the night falls and the light from the buzzing tubes on the ceiling dominates, that the subjects reveal themselves. What the audience can see are plants from the toxic nightshade family confronted with pictures of drug addicts.

WHY: Motivation/ Intentions

Over a period of day and night the changing of the light becomes a repeating cyclical phenomenon. During the day the picture is latent, that means present on the paper but still unrevealed by the blacklight. The spectator’s experience is subject to time and he is forced to wait for what will happen on the walls. And then when there is something depicted on the sheets, each silkscreen still arises on his place only an existential absence and links to the idea that what the audience can perceive is only a sign in a transition from being seen and fading away. In this work the night holds an important place, as a subject as well as an essential condition. There is an inversion of the darkness and the bright light, which leads to juxtaposition between life and death, between beauty and disease. A duality can be seen in this confrontation of the drug addicts and the nightshades. In the sense of the sublime it provokes fascination and repulsion in the same time. The Motive of the Casket Choice of Freud serves as connecting link to this work. The legend of the option between three possibilities is presented in Freud’s essay as a choice between three women and that it is always the third one chosen, which leads to a consequence that it is about a confrontation with the death. After Freud’s interpretation the three women are comparable with the three Fates who spin (Clotho), measure (Lachesis) and cut (Atropos) the thread of life. The name of this third figure guides directly to the deadly nightshade Atropa Belladonna. In psychoanalysis, ruptures structure the long thread of vitality. In the manner of Atropos, the nature of the light source textures in the end the cycle of appearance and disappearance in the work Black Light.

Energetic Transformation, 2012

In the entrance of a public building a huge surface of wood is installed on the wall of concrete. A gobo projector is placed in front and figures like a screen. Inside the building, besides every door which leads to the sports hall and to the tribune, there are pyrometers installed which measure the reflected heat of every person leaving and entering the hall. This registered energy is then passed forward to the projector in the entrance hall where a picture of a landscape appears on the wooden projection wall. The intensity depends on the heating of the people using the building. After duration of 10 years this procedure leaves a mark. Over time the light engraves in the wooden surface, fade it and provokes therefore a weathering in form of a silver grey patina. A natural process under the sun is being imitated and carried inside the architecture, where the energy of the people is transformed into a visible image.