THOUGHTS OF ARTIFICIAL ENVIRONMENT
Crime zones
During the work at Herzliya Museum a dialogue was created between us, as artist and architect. Our meeting brought a similar concern to the world surrounding us. This collaboration is leads us to the development of merging ideas.
Our common concern is based on spatial experiences of the immediate context we live in, as a critical view of the society and its physical basic translation and terror of it.
The works stand as documentaries, artificial constructions of urban realities, not sculptures but situations. It’s a dialogue between the viewer and the space he stands in, in an extension, exaggeration of something existing, sometimes deforming the reality.
Spaces “in-between”, non-places, crime zones. What is the identity of a space?
The gap between the planning and the reality creates a dissonance, a zone of tension as a working material for us. The dialogue between a model and a real construction leads to the fact that we can only plan, to reveal the truth of a space. In an inverse process, from reality back to planning, we have to stay into the critical strictness of reduction.
The perversion is merging when we create a parallel reality more real that the reality itself. Then we are closer to the “project’ itself, to exaggerate the physical experiences; it creates horror.
Folding reality.
Decadence happens to be into the weirdness of the exaggerated situations and not in the kitsch of the elements. Pornography happens to be in the act of inversion, inside-out, bringing to the eyes the unbearable that became our natural environment.
Physical experience is function of space, time, knowledge and memory. Playing with these elements creates an artificial situation, forcing the viewer to be a “voyeur” of a pornographic reality detached from its natural context to reveal the perversion of a familiar known environment. Everything happens in this momentum of tension between a very familiar (not questionable) place and a total new spatial experience. It obliges the visitor to look at the real reality and its actual esthetics, bringing to the light its basic defaults, defects, and the absurdity of our common acceptation of it. The act of framing, of isolation, taking a situation out of context for a moment brings up its own terror.
The reduction of the reality and the strictness of it bring death, sterility to the place and the viewer is a witness/actor of the place created. There is a distortion between the different times; a new created place based on something that passed already. The human scale of the work allows the visitor to re-experience it again and it becomes then something else through its physicality.
Another dialogue is created by the act of bringing these common places part of our natural environment into the white cube of the museum. The out there is inside or the inside is out. It’s based on a built up set, changing also the perception of the space it stands in. But it works in the fact that the set isn’t shown, never unveiled, so only then we can believe in this total new environment, created in its very small physical details. The impact on the visitor is total; the work is a physical experience.
Gil Marco Shani