Cerith Wyn Evans
dal 24/11/2006 al 24/2/2007
Segnalato da
24/11/2006
Cerith Wyn Evans
Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich
His artistic career goes back to the London underground scene of the late 70s, when he worked with the filmmakers Derek Jarman and John Maybury and was a protagonist in the avant-garde film movement known as the New Romantics. Here Evans is showing works in which he combines chandeliers from different epochs with citations from literature, the natural sciences and philosophy.
...in which something happens all over again for the very first time
Cerith Wyn Evans’s artistic career goes back to the London underground scene of the
late 1970s, when he worked closely with the British filmmakers Derek Jarman and John
Maybury and was a protagonist in the avant-garde film movement known as the New
Romantics. During the 1980s, Evans worked on a number of experimental 8mm and 16mm
films, in which he broke with the ascetic language of conceptual film and introduced
a new form of visual opulence, theatricality and symbolic physicality into film
discourse.
In the 1990s, Cerith Wyn Evans extended his means of expression. He produced photo
series and also sculptural and installation works, in which he further developed his
interest in the multi-layered cognitive and semiotic structures of perception. Using
references to works of literature, philosophy, music, the natural sciences, film and
art history, and also pursuing an aesthetic form influenced by Surrealism, Pre-Pop
and the situationist utopias of the 1960s and 1970s, Evans created visual and
intellectual kaleidoscopes with a highly individual language. In his installations,
text and light came to play an increasingly significant role alongside associative
objects such as plants and design objects. Language and its translation became the
vehicle for Cerith Wyn Evans to address the subject of identity, and light became
the medium by which he seduces the viewer into irritating, psychedelic and
bottomless worlds.
In the Kunstbau Cerith Wyn Evans is showing a choreography of works in which he combines chandeliers from different epochs with citations from literature, the natural sciences and philosophy. The texts are translated into Morse code and transmitted via the flashing lights of the
chandeliers. At the same time the process of translation is screened on monitors in
the background. The citations are taken from the artist’s own personal collection of
texts, forming a polyphony of divergent genres: letters, poems, novels,
conversations, science-fiction, scientific and philosophical works. The illegibility
of the texts in the outdated language of Morse code shows that Cerith Wyn Evans is
not concerned with universal readability but rather with deception, illusion and the
loss of meaning, with those gaps in communication where the irrational, the
disfunctional and the eccentric break through.
In the exhibition, this choreography is accompanied by three neon texts by the
artist. Cerith Wyn Evans has also invited the artist Florian Hecker to compose an
acoustic piece for the exhibition. Asynchronous Jitter, Selective Hearing is a
37-minute long 4-channel composition in combination with a 14-channel
computer-controlled spatialisation system. Staged literally in the center of the
exhibition, the spatio- sonic structure of the piece re-reflects the wave-particle
nature of the works surrounding it.
Opening: november 25, 2006
Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau
Luisenstrabe 33 - Munich