1997 - Yvonne Lammerich

THAT WHAT IS NOT: a 3-part installation

COLUMN (1997)

BLACK WAVE / WHITE WAVE (1997)

GLASS COLUMN (1997)

Galerie Occurrence, Montreal, 1997.

The title of this installation was inspired by a reading of fragments from the epic poem written by Parmenides (515 BCE), his own questioning of What is or What is not. The poem represents his own search for the idea of true reality in his own time.

The model was the fold, a visual rupture that inferred a spatial continuity beyond the limits of perception. It was a way of entering the conversation on painting through another dimension.

COLUMN (1997)

A one-minute looped video projection, located at the entrance before entering the gallery’s main space, shows the endless fluid motion of a wave as it folds from a surface into a column and back again to become a surface. This looped video moves seamlessly between being a surface and a three dimensional form.

BLACK WAVE / WHITE WAVE (1997)

In the gallery proper, BLACK WAVE / WHITE WAVE each occupied one of the walls angling out from one of the building’s structural columns. The painted sections in each case seem at first to be painted on the wall’s surface, but became instead recognizable as independent inserts embedded in the wall, giving them the appearance of moving through the walls’ surfaces.

GLASS COLUMN (1997)

This third element, consisting of three successive glass panels onto which are etched lines representing a column (similar to the building’s columns on each side that make up the ‘perspective theatre’. As the viewer visually navigates these planes there is a point in the spatial relationship of the viewer to the lines that permits the lines to reassemble into what appears a three dimensional reconstructed drawing of the adjacent columns. However, as the viewer shifts beyond this position, the lines disassemble into seemingly random lines.