Illusion
Someone invented the word “image” in order to distinguish between what is actually there and what can merely be seen – a completely reasonable act against tomfoolery. Painters did their best to overcome the limitations imposed on them: an entire craft of illusion that extends from antiquity to late-medieval Florence and beyond. The enjoyment, one might say, lay in the fact that the objects looked real, or, by the same token, that viewers did not recognize images as such. At least not right away. Such illusions could hardly be achieved by means of human or animal figures, nor with pictures of flowers or grasses, since the absence of motion would have been considered a sure sign that one was not looking at the object itself, but rather at a picture. Thus it is not so very surprising that the strategy of illusion was practiced above all by means of inanimate objects or deceased animals. This exercise in the trompe-l’oeil technique was a precursor to what would later be called “stil leven” in Holland; practically a paradox: something that is alive but does not move. Hence as long as it was a question of illusion or bafflement, the era of creating meaning had not yet begun.
Tamara Lorenz is a photographer and sculptor, alchemist, operator in front of and behind the camera. Spatial and graphic thinking overlap here, towards existential discourse. Thus, the artist develops architectural-spatial sculptures and collages, and then transfers them into photography. Objectivity and subjectivity, formal minimalism and sovereign expression oscillate here in a perpetual process of perception and thought that condenses where the formally cool image surface opens up into the real and into depth – a Fontana cut into a world behind the visual surface, while its immediacy equally ties the motif back to the reality of the material, the studio, and the artistic handwriting. Lorenz’ s interest is in a radical constructivist approach and therein the absolute subjectivity of perception. Perception is never objective. Perception is always construction.
Text by Jari Ortwig
Sarah Straßmann studied photography and media at the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and did her PhD in Fine Art at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. She lives and works in Berlin. Her works, which have been exhibited internationally, deal with the order of object and space in the picture, as well as their relationship to each other. Aesthetic representations and symbols of a place and its objects are also examined, mainly with regard to historical, cultural and subjectively emotional meaning. Straßmann’s most recent works are increasingly expanding the two-dimensional photo into photographic installations and sculptures.
The work ‚Shifting‘ is dedicated to the interior of the Freilichtmuseum in Detmold (Germany). The term shifting, is translated as translocation (Translozierung in German), if you search in the terminology of the built heritage conservation discurs. The project investigates this process of shifting in a diverse manner. In the photographs an overlay of space, history, staging and new reality is happening.
The work ‚The Chase’ explores the spaces behind the scenes of the museum Marta in Herford (Germany), which was designed by the architect Frank Gehry. Light, shade, reflections, surfaces and materials develope their own independent existence and contribute to a composition pointing beyond the depicted. In addition to personal associations the relation between space and its representation aswell as the meaning of space as places of rememberance are being questioned.
