Above: left wall of the space. Black paint on wall, safelight, projection of 3D-animationloop with Antwerp-based musician Tim Vanhamel’s soundtrack. The safelights made the black paint turn infinate and the projection, which was the same I used during the Trajector Art Fair in Brussels a couple of weeks earlier, was projected onto the black surface. This was an experiment about how to integrate an animation into a drawing and use the drawing as some sort of picture frame. I was particularly happy with the depth of the scene. The design of the wallpainting was made in 3D. The window is a model of my own windows, the lamp on the left is a rough model of the lamp I’ve used in the Trajector installation and in the Base-Alpha performance night (it’s the lamp of my gallerist) and the little desk/table is a model of the table I make smaller drawings on. It used to be my grandmother’s. The chair is the same virtual chair as the one in one of the wallpieces in the Dunsmuir exhibition.
The first wallpiece is the most important but it seemed weird to leave the other wall blank so I made this painting, using a safelight to get more depth. I decided to make some sort of negative of the tiled wall on the left – which is in fact the far end of the SecondRoom space and has an opening to a small, also tiled hallway to the toilet. I combined this with a skull with an inkdrip running over the top, also based on a 3D model. It was rather dark so it’s difficult to see, but there’s a black ‘hole’ next to the skull in which I put a bamboostick with black paint and black rope that seems to come out of the ‘hole’ as a research in obtaining depth into a drawing, a denial of the surface. It’s an attempt to turn a drawing into a three-dimensional image or installation.
In the space there was also a bamboostick on the tiled wall of the small hallway to the toilet and I taped my black, but white-spotted due to paint-jobs, overall to a mirror at the other far end of the space. This is the most conceptual piece I’ve ever done. I found out a lot of things, which is really good. One of those things is anticipating on the timeframe (a one-night exhibition and the concentration-span of the visitors in that respect, dealing with a space that is rather easy at first sight but much more difficult at second).
Though all the attention went to the first wallpiece, with the animation integrated in it, I actually also somehow liked the other piece too – in this space. The skull is just an excuse
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I know using a skull in an artwork is a tricky thing to do, but in this case I felt more or less o.k. with it. Just recently geneticists decoded 40 percent of the Neanderthal genomes and compared it to modern human genomes and it seems that large parts of the world’s population have one to four percent of their genes inhereted from the Homo neanderthalensis. In my opinion fantastic but not unexpected news. Jan Dietvorst once gave me this book: ‘From Lucy to language‘, which portrayes a large part of all the remains of human ancestors in real sizes. The ‘latest’ Neanderhal skull is shockingly similar to ours. At that time, about 40.000 years ago, we probably couldn’t tell eachother apart.
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but I’m quite happy with the tile-drawing on the ‘background’, that sometimes disappears and turns into a hole (with the skull in one hole, the other one empty). Wallpieces might be a good way to present framed drawings, computerprints or animations within a context – another ‘space’ in the wall, maybe.
Here’s a video-overview. It starts with an exerpt of the projected animation and then some overviews:
