Dissolution, 2010.

Pernille With Madsen, Dissolution

21 May – 26 June 2010

The spectator’s vision is obscured by diagonal black stripes on the gallery’s windows which correspond and establishes a relation to horizontal black stripes on the entrance wall of the gallery facing the windows. The stripes criss-crosses each other creating a flickering and confusing moiré-effect which at the point of entry into the gallery room fully encircles the spectator and causes the room to dissolve. This encroachment on the visitor’s senses which integrates space and surface is part of Pernille With Madsen’s exhibition at Galleri Susanne Ottesen from May to June. Furthermore the exhibition comprises video projection, installation and drawing.

Pernille With Madsen (b.1972) works with video, photography and installation with which she investigates the architectural spaces and structures that surround our lives. In Pernille With Madsen’s work our conception of the relation between the two dimensional and the three dimensional, the surface and the spaces we occupy are investigated and at times become dissolved. Video is a medium which confuses the senses and our perception of the dimensions, as a relatable three dimensional room is reproduced on a flat surface whereby an element of disorientation is introduced. The interest in the collapse of well known structures, where spaces are transformed and become alien and strange to us, is a key theme in Pernille With Madsen’s work. With intervening spatial actions and strict but shimmering filmic sequences, the artist seeks to question our perception of reality and hereby open up the possibility of a new perspective.

The diagonal and horizontal stripes in the gallery’s first room become a sort of “live setting” which re-enacts the most inner room of the gallery, where a double projection is set, and as an addition the spectator become a part of the work by actually being in it. The double projection in the most inner room form a frieze across the wall, and in it we see a sequence where the camera is panning in and out, whereby the sense of inside and outside, surface and space, reality and fiction is obscured. As in a kaleidoscopic displacement of space and perspective the spectator is sucked into a universe of reflections, shimmering stripes and vibrating dots which enticingly glides across the wall and leaves the spectator in a state of spatial uncertainty and dizziness. The video is shot in a derelict women’s department store with mirrors from floor to ceiling, windows facing the street, halogen lighting, and rows of dressing rooms en suite. Increasingly the room falls apart both in a physical and an abstract sense through the simple measures the artist applies, where three spatial planes or realities glides in and out of each other: the room outside, the room inside and the constructed room.

In the installation Tidsmaskine (Timemachine), in the gallery’s middle room, the spectator becomes lost in an array of reflections, projections and black and white moiré effects. Tidsmaskine is a work which both exists physically in the gallery room and in the video projected onto the wall. In Tidsmaskine these two dimensions are joined together in a sort of infinite projection, displacing space and time as well as the spectator’s sense of self. In the projection, a camera is seen dangling from the ceiling of a dressing room with the camera lens pointed towards a mirror at one end of the room creating an infinite pendular motion of referencing back and forth between the room in which it is set and itself. The displacement in the work is strengthened through a suspended mirror which both mimics and reflects the projection and incorporates the spectator’s body in the installation. The camera, the mirrors and the projections hereby actualize the classical complex of problems between looking at and being looked at. The shimmering black and white, circular drawings which encircles the mirrors, lenses and projections, and thereby the spectator, strengthens the impact of the work, cheats the eye and directs our attention toward what we actually see and how we percept.

Inger Marie Hahn Møller, MA in Art History