Exhibition
SINTA WERNER Along the Sight Lines - Nettie Horn
Berlin based artist Sinta Werner featuring a site-specific installation as well as a new series of collages.
Werner aims to interrogate our conventional ways of seeing and representing through elaborate fictitious environments. The creation of these architectonic works notably contributes to her exploration of virtual and physical boundaries, the indefinable notion of "in-betweens" as well as other such aspects linking the two and the three dimensional.
Within the main space of the gallery, Werner’s site specific installation “Along the Sight Lines” stems from her playful use of the effect of “double exposure” – the installation in itself evokes a vision perceived from two different angles which is effective from the optimal viewing point of the threshold of the space. In order to create this “double-take”, Werner resorts to a combination of processes driven by the use of digital media; an important and innovative element in her work. As a starting point, she uses images of the gallery space which she then projects within that same space by shifting its original positioning – the whole architectural configuration being in this way subjected to a virtual spatial rotation. In order to create this second exposure, Werner materializes this shifted image of the entitic structure through two steps: certain architectural elements such as pillars and beams are rebuilt while the walls, floor, ceiling and pillars are painted according to the projected anamorphic images.
The experiencing of Werner’s site-specific work is reached through a dual process of revelation: at first, the concept of one-point-perspective, which intervenes in most of her installations, offers a fixed and contemplative vision refering to photography and Renaissance painting; the discovery of the mechanisms of the illusion then leads to a vision of multiple points of views recalling postmodernistic principles.
The use of digital media intervenes logically and intrinsically in Werner’s work and allows the elements of disillusionment and deconstruction to be as important as the one of illusion. Jean Baudrillard expresses this particular idea in his essay “Aesthetic, Illusion and Disillusion” whereby he explains how virtuality allows us to step beyond illusion (to the point of its near destruction) and enabling us to enter the image itself. This virtuality creates a three-dimensional realistic image and may even go so far as to reveal a fourth dimension, transforming it to the point of the hyper real...(1). By pushing the viewer to go beyond the illusion Werner allows them to become aware of their own perception of space and their own movement in space, effectively evoking the notion of stability - and thus sending us back to the true nature of our subjectivity as being fragmented and de-centered (2).
