Plunge / Soar – Alexandra Navratil
25th October – 29th November 2014
Opening reception 24th October, 6 – 8 pm
Buoyancy
A train approaches. Sign of a dark future, the passing Cyclops brings the promise of gloomy days, with their light skins and obscured minds. On the bright screen, high speed mimics slow motion, as a bored audience contemplates the beauty of a subliminal land. She’s gone already! A delayed encounter: the ghost on the picture wonders if anyone will notice her fleeting self, she hopes not.
Can the artist unearth and magnify the invisible? It feels like an apology to the phantoms, and the circles of light remind me of moons. As I write this, the blood full moon sheds a sad light on the plane that takes me back to Berlin. My analytical self gets anxious while picturing a circular lens floating above a perfect square; geometry never bothered to name useless figures. The unfair hierarchy of description saddens me.
Like a second eye, the new gaze brings updated mythologies. White fluffy snow within a light transparent prison. We feel nostalgic of a time we never experienced, and guilty of a history we did not write. An anonymous army of pointy cone heads bustling around. What’s the ransom of their memory, their prosperity? After all, a photograph is only light on processed paper, it calls for great and combined efforts of interpretation and carries a subtle mix of hope, faith and despair.
He saw the light that was good and separated the light from the darkness
Genesis 1:4
Upwards, downwards. Hand-picked orders celebrate the apotheosis of the commodity, in the sad tale of self-improvement. Yet, successful market strategies are not discrete, and the streamline of injunctions hits my faith in freedom.
I can’t
I can’t
I can’t
I can’t
I can’t
I can’t
I can’t
I can’t
Soon my overwhelmed incapacity brings my gaze back to the phantoms. Next ones. I want to repeat the words over and over. I want to transgress, transcend. “We need not to be let alone” advised Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451, in an attempt to warn us against domination. Ray would love the multiplication of waterfalls on the screens. They are just another army of anonymous; they are the Praetorian guards of creativity, our liquid gates to digital paradise.
Elise Lammer, Berlin, October 2014
Alexandra Navratil’s Plunge / Soar, by Aoife Rosenmeyer, art agenda