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&HOW: 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.

TO WHAT DEGREE DID THE WORK SUCCEED, HOW COULD IT FAIL?

Energetic Transformation, 2012

WHAT: Description
A huge plane of wood is installed on a wall of concrete inside the entrance hall of a public building. It depicts an image of a landscape colored by a silver grey patina. This is going to be the result of a projection and its strong light, which engraves and provokes a weathering on the wooden surface that figures during ten years as its screen.

WHY&HOW: Motivation/ Intentions
The creation of this work takes place in a building containing several sports halls for the people of the municipality and the students following their apprenticeship in the same building. The idea is to integrate over duration of several years the users of the building by measuring their energy. Besides every door, which leads to the sports hall and to the tribune, pyrometers measure the reflected heat of every person leaving and entering the hall. The registered values are then passed forward to a projector in the entrance hall, where the work finally receives his shape. A photograph of a landscape from the environs emerges through a projection. Its intensity and therefore its clarity of the representation alternate because of its dependence from the measured heat of the people acting inside the building. After a period of 10 years this constant projection on the wooden surface leaves a mark in form of a silver grey patina. A natural process of weathering under the sun is being imitated and carried inside the architecture. The invisible energy is transformed and results finally in a manifestation of a landscape. The choice of the material used is essential. The wood for the projection wall comes from the environment of Sion, a small town in the middle of the Swiss mountains. It is larch wood, which is well known in the area and marks the characteristic landscape. Taken out from the nature inside the building, the wood represents the link between human and architecture. Besides that interpretation, the integrated process of weathering underlines the meaning of time. The wish to appeal the users is particularly linked to the apprentices and their education at the vocational school. They are learning during four years their profession and they proceed at that age, sometimes without knowing it consciously a very significant development. From this note comes the idea of employing a visitor integrated long time procedure in the work, in which the users unnoticed participation with their energy will only be recognizable after a retrospective

TO WHAT DEGREE DID THE WORK SUCCEED, HOW COULD IT FAIL?

WHAT ARE THE COMMON CONCERNS?