Artist Robert Seidel loves to play at the fuzzy border between sculpture, still images and art in motion. He’s at it again with “grapheme”, projecting piercingly bizarre video images on delicate suspended shapes that defy the conventions of a stationary, rectangular screen.
Starting with sketches drawn from memories and associations, Seidel created a kinetic video display that moves through time without ever conveying a fixed start or end point. As the artist puts it:
The organic projection sculpture frees the film from the dogmatic limitations of rectangular silver screens and monitors. These delicate, laser-cut tissues float in the architectural space, light spills over them, and they come to life before the viewers’ eyes.
Mirrors reflect the projected film image back onto viewers and allow them to become part of the work in the form of their own reflected image. In the multiple layers of the work, observers’ personal memories, their own reflection, that of the museum environment, the installation and the daylight become bound together into a situational work of art.
Slowly, gradually, what starts out bizarre and a bit frightening becomes engrossing, mesmerising, the music by Heiko Tippelt slowly morphing and mellowing to join the imagery in an endless union in your mind.
The installation debuts at Germany’s Museum Wiesbaden on 7 May 2014.