structurescapes book layout

1 Arts on 5: Structurescapes / www.essex.ac.uk/artson5

ContentsIntroduction 2

Dystopia Rising: Utopian traces in the city - Dr Nathaniel Coleman 4

Unmasking the Picturesque - Min Wood 7

Featured Artists

-David Cotterrell 11

- León Ferrari 14

- Sachiyo Nasimura 16

- Jane Prophet 19

- Sinta Werner 21

Acknowledgements 23

Arts on 5: Structurescapes / www.essex.ac.uk/artson5 2

IntroductionSusan CrossCurator at Mass MoCA

The dream of building a more perfect society has captivated the imaginations of artists, architects, writers, and philosophers alike even before Thomas More described Utopia in his fictional account of an ideal, island community in 1516. What is Edenic for some, however, may seem like hell to others, and embedded in most conceptualizations of utopia is the specter of its failure, and even its opposite: dystopia. With Structurescapes the Essex University Gallery presents the works of five artists who explore the terrain where these mirrored states intersect. Looking at the built environment as well as the altered, natural landscape as the structures that shape our society, relationships, daily rituals, and views of the world, the five artists featured each reveal how the desire to control and order our surroundings in the name of progress, beauty, or harmony can also be framed as means of oppression or artifice. The risks of sacrificing an individual’s freedoms for the good of the collective – as well as the reverse – also figure in many of the works on view which speak both to social and political debates of the past two centuries and to the issues we face now on both a global and a quotidian level. As the formerly Communist nations of both Russia and China enthusiastically embrace the values of Capitalism, and the United States fosters more intentional communities and moves toward adopting social programs like universal health care, while all of us must choose on a daily basis between familiarity and convenience or the fate of the environment (while many simultaneously fight to keep our vision of a pristine wilderness free of the wind turbines that might save it), a new, complex and contradictory vision for the future is being formed. Stucturescapes hints at both the possibilities and pitfalls. David Cotterrell’s Roadrunner (2008) a handmade silk carpet with a design motif based on urban planning concepts for the development of Shanghai, illustrates the disconnection between the abstract beauty of the idea and the alienating, repetition of the reality. Cotterrell’s earlier video work Shangri La (2002) meanwhile celebrates the irrepressible expressions of individuality that distinguish the similarly uniform homes of his childhood London neighborhood. With Distant Landscape (2008) Sachiyo Nishimura also reflects on the sameness that characterizes industrialized society with overlapped images of three cities that together create a familiar, even strangely pleasing nowhere that might become the reality in the not-too-distant future. Leon Ferrari’s heliographs similarly illustrate the beauty and misery that can co-exist within order as well as the freedom that may lie within chaos. Jane Prophet’s animated Decoy series (2002) deconstructs the nostalgic, Arcadian fantasies of iconic Eighteenth-century English gardens with images of nature as artifice or its wild, but imperfect counterpart. Finally


Sinta Werner’s disorienting reconfigurations of space propose an architecture without conventional logic, freeing us to imagine new ways of inhabiting or sharing our environment. This is ultimately what drives both the large-scale social and political upheavals that have lead to the now failed Socialist revolutions of the Twentieth century and the micro-utopias of the Nineteenth century artist brotherhoods such as the Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites or contemporary projects such as Rirkrit Tiravanija’s The Land or The Balitmore Development Corporation’s Participation Park - the desire to construct, or at least dream of alternative modes of living and sharing social space. The common struggle is to find the balance between the needs of the individual and that of the collective.


Dystopia Rising:Utopian Traces in the CityDr Nathaniel ColemanNewcastle University, [email protected]

DystopiaDo we live in Utopia? Is ‘degenerate Utopia’ just another way of saying ‘Dystopia’? Is ‘Dystopia’ simply ‘Utopia’ inverted? Or, do each of these terms: Utopia, Dystopia and Degenerate Utopia, each signify something distinct that could help us to begin imagining (better) alternatives to present conditions? In answering these questions one might do well to begin with the OED (Oxford English Dictionary). But ‘begin’ must remain the operative word. Okay, according to the OED, Dystopia is, ‘An imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible,’ the opposite of Utopia. Thus, a ‘dystopian [is] one who advocates or describes a dystopia’ but it also pertains ‘to a dystopia’, whereas ‘dystopianism [indicates] dystopian quality or characteristics.’ The overview of Dystopia given in the OED confirms its variety of potential meanings. Most interesting, perhaps, is that it is a relatively young word, the first recorded appearance of which in English is dated as 1868: ‘It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or caco-topians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable.’ John Stewart Mill’s coinage of Dystopia actually sheds light on how Utopia and Dystopia differ. The so-called Utopians Mill refers to hardly matters, rather, what is important is the distinction he makes between Utopia as aiming at something ‘good’ while Dystopia aims at something ‘bad’.

Either/OrNow, setting aside the tendency of relativism (or extreme subjectivity) to enervate leaps toward the Possible-Impossible (of Henri Lefebvre’s Utopia in the positive) in contemporary social and political thought (identified by David Harvey as a non-productive ‘both/and’ cul-de-sac), Utopia and Dystopia really cannot be interchangeable, as their aims are diametrically opposed. Even if the sense that Dystopia is the opposite of Utopia persists, common usage has tended to muddy the affair, moving from Dystopia as ‘inverted utopia’ to a kind of interchangeability between them: ‘A strand of utopianism or dystopianism’, as one writer put it. Conjoining the two establishes a ‘both/and’ condition that promises both confusion and failure, suggesting that Utopia is always already Dystopia, no matter how attractive. More productive would be to maintain the ‘either/or’ divide David Harvey argues for in Spaces of Hope (2000). Only by making a deliberate decision between alternatives, that is, only by cutting


off one option, can life be promised to the other. In fact, to decide carries within its very meaning a sense of necessary certainty. Coming from the Latin decidere, to cut off, ‘by giving the victory to one side or the other’ of a choice or conflict, decide can have no truck with ‘both/and’. In point of fact, ethical behavior requires that the ambivalence of extreme relativism and subjectivity be overcome so that something like provisional certainty can arise, such as utopian imagination requires.

UtopiaCoined in 1516 by Sir (Saint) Thomas More, Utopia is a much older word than Dystopia. Because More’s Utopia depicts an imaginary island enjoying a putatively perfect social, legal, and political system, Utopia has primarily come to be associated with all such representations of the same, literary, architectural and political. However, Utopia contains within itself two senses that when taken together establishes something of a paradox: referring to the Greek ou (no) and eu (good) plus topos (place), Utopia connotes both a good and a no place. By being a good no place, Utopia seems to inscribe within itself the most common criticism of it: impossibility, worse still, that no place can be (or even approximate) an ideal state. More troubling still, because the ideal state depicted in Utopia requires a degree of coercion, as all social organizations do, Utopia has come to be associated with totalitarianism, which has deprived imagination of a concept for possibilities. In the absence of a crucial habit for thinking about how to achieve the possible-impossible, the culturally dominant conviction that ‘there is no alternative’ has taken on the character of a natural law, leading writers such as Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson to observe, in effect, that ‘it is now easier for us to imagine the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism.’

Degenerate UtopiaWhere the end of Utopia, the world and capitalism meet seems a good place to turn my attention toward degenerate Utopia and the city, which, after all, in our time pretty much amounts to the same thing. Louis Marin’s proposition is that: ‘A degenerate utopia is ideology changed into the form of a myth.’ (Marin, ‘Disneyland’, available online) One such myth could be capitalism, another could be modernity or modernism, and a third might be the contemporary city as the concretization of capitalist realism. However, our city--the ones that most of us inhabit--could be construed as Utopias by neoliberals, as constituting the best of all possible worlds; or, equally so by anti-utopians, who see in the modern city a realization of Utopia, that is, dystopia. In any event, the contemporary city stands primarily as confirmation ‘of the impotence of corporate capital to generate a socially cohesive environment.’ (Rykwert, Seduction: 2002, 227) As such, it is also arguably no Utopia, which persists as an open project.


Utopian ProspectYet, if a Utopian prospect for the city, which means for us as well, actually does exist, its traces are to be found in the already existing city--historical and modern--alike, even in the depths of apparent dystopia. Where to look is the most pressing question. The answer is both obvious and obscure: Utopia’s trace resides in the everyday life of the city, especially in those mundane activities of ordinary citizens that have somehow remained free of the dual cancers of advertising and consumption, which deprive individuals and communities of whatever lingering agency they may have by transforming each of us into consumers only. Lest we allow the stultifying effects of the society of the spectacle to prevail, resistance must begin with the self and through the imagining of alternatives together.


Unmasking The PicturesqueMin WoodUniversity of Bristol

Picturesque is such a comfortable word. It promises the depiction on canvas, on paper, in some other medium or in the mind of some scene which will be of continuing interest to the viewer. Yet, we have given the word a dark hinterland, we have given it a bad name.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was not technically correct when he wrote, in The Little Prince, ‘It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’, but he had the essence of perception in mind. The eye is merely a sensor, which like a lens, offers the mind an inverted image of what is before us. That sensor like those of our other senses, taste, hearing, touch and scent, may be more or less impaired. Both Monet and Cezanne suffered from eye disease which may go some way to explain the diffuse images they both painted toward the end of their lives.

However, the performance of those sensors, does not provide the real key to the differences in the aesthetic appreciation of a given image by different people. For the most part that lies in the mind. By the end of the 18th century it had been firmly established in Western thought that an aesthetic quality could not reside in an object but was the product of associations consciously, or unconsciously, applied by the mind to what is presented to it.

Four cigarette butts are not themselves, beautiful, picturesque or sublime. Yet that masterful photographer the late Irving Penn was to make a satisfactory picture from them. To him therefore they were picturesque whatever you may make of either cigarette butts or his picture. Those wretches huddled together for warmth and comfort in the London Underground during the Blitz, so attractively portrayed in the Henry Moore wartime sketches, are just people coping with extreme circumstances. It was the artist who found them a suitable subject of a painting and we are not compelled to share his view. He may have intended the sketches to convey the horror of war, but we can see in them the beauty and compassion of humanity if we wish.

William Gilpin, though not the father of the use of the word Picturesque (it has honourable origins in Italian of looking at a subject as might a painter or being a suitable subject for a painting) set out to explore its meaning in his Essay 1 on Picturesque Beauty of 1791. He concluded that the search for principles which defined a picturesque quality in an object was a fruitless enterprise. He wrote ‘Thus, in our inquiries into first principles, we go on without end, and


without satisfaction.’ He ended the Essay with the wry comment ‘if a cause be sufficiently understood, it may suggest useful discoveries. But if it be not so (and where is our certainty in these disquisitions) it will unquestionably mislead’. In correspondence with Sir Joshua Reynolds about his Essay he wrote ‘With regards to the term picturesque I have used it merely to denote such objects as are proper subjects for painting; so that according to my definition, one of the cartoons and a flower piece are equally picturesque.’That Essay was sent to Uvedale Price in 1791 whilst he was slaving away on his own Essay on the Picturesque. Price rather stuffily observed ‘Great part of my Essay was written, before I saw that of Mr Gilpin’ and ‘Had I not advanced too far to think of retreating I might possibly be deterred by so absolute a veto from such an authority’. He forged on and the word Picturesque has never fully recovered.

It was Uvedale Price’s view that people or places could themselves have the quality of being picturesque and that this was a quality which could be distinguished from the beautiful and the sublime, aesthetic categories which Hume and Kant had debated with great energy. He believed also that one could identify what it was in the character of an object that would make it picturesque; roughness, sudden variation and irregularity. The deformed person, the broken tree and the rutted track would, he suggested, be neither beautiful nor sublime but would be picturesque. In 1805 his friend Payne Knight took these arguments apart in ‘An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste’ insisting that the reasons why such objects might be thought charming were ‘to be sought..in the minds of the spectators, where I believe all the charm will ultimately be found.’ If Price was right aesthetic satisfaction was to be had at the price of misery for people and natural decay. Price fell silent on the subject.

That might have been the end of the matter had not that great commentator on the arts Christopher Hussey, finding a copy of the Uvedale Price’s Essay in the shelves of the library at Scotney Castle, took up Price’s views and set them the heart of his commentary on landscapes in his 1927 The Picturesque; Studies in a Point of View. It is now commonplace to describe something as being picturesque as if that were an apt description of its nature. The exclamation ‘Ah, look what a picturesque landscape’ would give the blind person no clue as to the landscape being described. The expression might be used equally well to describe an elegant Georgian park, or a squalid Brazilian Favella. Of course using other senses such as hearing or smell some distinctions might be obvious!

How could Price have fallen into his stubborn adherence to the idea that a landscape could, itself, have an aesthetic value. At Foxley he had inherited from his artist father an estate which on any view may be called beautiful. It lies in the bosomy hills to the north of Hereford. It has a soft and gentle character. However he was competing in his attempts at landscape improvement against


friends Richard Payne Knight and Thomas Johnes both of whom had more rugged nature at their command. At Payne Knight’s Downton, near Ludlow, the tumbling Teme cut a gorge through the countryside and at Johnes’s Hafod the rushing Ystwith tumbled through the moorland of West Wales. Both places offered intricacy and variety in abundance. For Uvedale Price those characteristics could only be provided by lesser accidents of nature such as broken trees, tumbledown buildings and rutted cartways. Price was hell bent on establishing that his estate could be as ‘picturesque’ as those of his friends, although, plainly, it wasn’t.

If one strips away his arguments and looks only at his descriptions of what he was doing at Foxley one finds that he was engaged in a continuing negotiation with natural forces to produce effects that gave him some aesthetic satisfaction. He would spend happy hours with two employees he called his ‘squirrels’ nipping and tucking the natural growth of tree cover in a process which may be called Naturesque.

The contributors to this ‘Structurescapes’ Exhibition have worked with different forces. They have looked not so much at the natural world , but rather at the imprint of human activity. The distant view of the city or an examination of patterns of development are exercises in exciting half forgotten associations. But let us be careful before we describe the objects from which these images have been drawn as being themselves picturesque.

Uvedale Price and Hussey have left us a legacy in which we have come to describe the consequences of some of the most miserable human conditions as picturesque. The bombed Guernica was not itself picturesque even though Picasso’s representation of it is a masterpiece. How do we distinguish between that and Goya’s smooth, and to most minds beautiful, Naked Maja which also makes a very good picture. In our heads of course.


Featured ArtistsDavid Cotterrell

León FerrariSachiyo Nishimura

Jane ProphetSinta Werner


David CotterrellShangri-La2002, video projection, Collaborators: Jim Copperthwaite

Shangri-La, Cotterrell’s affectionate ode to his childhood home, is a time-based photographic montage depicting 80 of the hundreds of identical semi-detached houses built in Gants Hill in the 1930’s. The piece, named for Ray Davies’ suburban idyll, was commissioned for the exhibition at the Museum of Garden History, London.

The projection morphs digitised images, enabling one identical house to gently flow into the next. The camera’s relentless study of architecture invites us to recognise differences between seemingly similar buildings. We see the façade of each house has been altered, autographed by its inhabitants: one is covered with a veneer of stone cladding, another decorated with gnomes, but all share the desire to stand out. Residents have gone to startling lengths to create uniqueness out of sameness. An ambient soundtrack of sprinklers and birdsong, composed by Jim Copperthwaite, accompanies the work. Text Courtesy of Danielle Arnaud

Within Structurescapes, Shangri-La highlights the juxtaposition of differing idylls. All domestically similar but highly differential the montage shows how opposing visions of constructed idealisms can sit side by side to emphasise all at once, their beauty, their unsightliness and their fabrication.


Roadrunner2008, handmade silk carpet, 3.0, 4.0, 0.3m

A silk carpet offering a planners perspective of a dystopian road network.Roadrunner is inspired by the abstraction that planners and architects experience when designing road networks. Beijing’s designers are privy to a vision of the city few on the ground ever experience: the Bird’s Eye view of the city reveals a formal beauty from above that is obliterated once the viewer is returned to the human scale and is forced to navigate a labyrinthine system.The carpet is a somewhat ironic attempt to domesticate the road - the tradition of carpets made by hand, by women, that tell contemporary stories through traditional motifs is subverted by a pattern that reminds us of the impossibility of returning to a comfortable, nostalgic vision of the past.Text Courtesy of Danielle Arnaud

Roadrunner highlights the highly constructivist nature of our world. The composition of the carpet personifies the engineering of a road network, a creation to reveal a construction. At the same time its intrinsic beauty is pitted against its dystopian operation, accentuating the inherent friction found between the utopian and dystopian principles of construction that Structurescapes explores.


Artist Bio

David is an installation artist working across varied media including video, audio, interactive media, artificial intelligence, device control and hybrid technology. His work exhibits political, social and behavioural analyses of the environments and contexts, which he and his work inhabit.

Over the last ten years, his work has been extensively commissioned and exhibited in North America, Europe and the Far East, in gallery spaces, museums and within the public realm. Recent exhibitions include: Eastern Standard: Western Artists in China at MASS MoCA, Massachusetts, War and Medicine at the Wellcome Collection, London and Map Games at the Today Museum of Modern Art, Beijing and Birmingham City Art Gallery.

David is Professor of Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and has been a consultant to strategic masterplans, cultural and public art policy for urban regeneration, healthcare and growth areas. He is represented by Danielle Arnaud contemporary art and is currently researching and developing new work with advanced simulation company Rockwell Collins, with the support of an Arts Council England fellowship.

Text Courtesy of Danielle Arnaud

Images supporting this text all Courtesy of Danielle Arnaud


León FerrariRua (Street),1980 – 2000 Indian ink and Letraset symbols on paper

From the series Architectures of Madness, Rua depicts a section of an imaginary city. In this, the largest work in the series, the image is more tightly focused, representing a single street. This is a Gods-eye perspective on a dwarfed city, hundreds of impossible situations are seen from above.

This street contains corridors and rooms displaying fragments of hectic but incomprehensible life: rooms with beds at the centre are converted into places of pilgrimage or corporate meeting rooms; rows of people queue up to arrive while other rows of people seem to be simply waiting for something to happen; clusters of beds create cross-shaped patterns; identical figures sit round large board-room tables.

Perhaps because of its size, this is a peculiarly powerful work. The loneliness and alienation suggested by the rest of the series are here more acute, as if one were intimate witness to the very heart of madness.Text courtesy of Gabriela Salgado © UECLAA

Ferrari created this street plan inspired by the urban reality of São Paulo, where the artist was living at the end of the 1970s and into the early 1980s. Ferrari critiques modern city life and reveals the dystopian side of the city which fits well with Structurescapes’ own theme. The highly constructed nature of the plan reveals how in creating a city its utopian and dystopian principles can be overlooked by the occupant as we are blinded and directed by its fabrication as a construction.


Artist Biography

León Ferrari was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1920. A self-taught artist, sculptor, painter and printmaker, he studied Engineering at the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales of the Universidad de Buenos Aires (1938-47).

Among the many awards he has received are the Leão de Ouro, 52nd International Art Exhibition, Biennale di Venezia, Italy (2007); Grande Prêmio da Crítica, Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte, Brazil (2006); Show of the Year Award, Asociación de Críticos de Arte (AACA), Argentina (2005); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1995).

His most significant solo exhibitions are Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (2009); León Ferrari: Obras 1976-2008, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2008); León Ferrari: Antológica, Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan B. Castagnino, Rosario, Argentina (2008); León Ferrari: Retrospectiva 1954-2006, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2006); Retrospectiva León Ferrari, obras 1954-2004, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires (2004); and Infiernos e idolatrías, ICI, Buenos Aires (2000), among many others.

His work has been included in many group exhibitions, the most important of these being: De la abstracción al cinetismo, Casa de las Américas, Havana, Cuba (2009); Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany (2007); 52nd International Art Exhibition, Biennale di Venezia (2007); Cómo vivir juntos, 27ª Bienal Internacional de São Paulo (2007); Inverted Utopias, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston (2004); and Tucumán Arde, CGT de Rosario and CGT de Buenos Aires, Argentina (1968).


Sachiyo NishimuraDistant Landscapes2008. C-Type Prints. Courtesy of the artist.

Nishimura’s Distant Landscapes is a picturesque photomontage made by combining three different cityscapes that share similar features. By manipulating and overlapping the photographs she constructs a fictional landscape. The highly fabricated structure of this artwork situates this piece well within the context of Structurescapes. The layering emphasises utopian and dystopian principles of construction as well as highlighting how easily we can be manipulated into overlooking the fabrication of our own environment. At first glance the viewer cannot deduce whether it is a real landscape or not.


Artist Biography

Born in Santiago de Chile (1978) she is currently based in London. Sachiyo completed her BA in Fine Arts at Universidad Católica de Chile in 2001 and in 2002 attended professional courses on photography at Grisart and IDEP in Barcelona, Spain. In 2007 she moved to London to complete her MA in Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, UK.

She has participated in several solo and group exhibitions in Chile at venues such as the Contemporary Art Museum of Santiago, Galería AFA and Galería A.M.S. Sachiyo also exhibited at the National Museum of Art Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2008, as part of the group show “Signes d’existence”, which gathered a group of artists from France, Argentina and Chile.

Most recently in the UK, her work was selected and exhibited on Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2008 (Liverpool Biennial and London), she was invited to have a solo show at the Howard Gardens Gallery (UWIC, Cardiff) and won the first prize at the DLA Piper Art Award 2009 (London).


Artist Statement

“There are certain spaces in the cities that, located both inside and at the outskirts, have become almost imperceptible to the casual viewer. Even though they are part of most urban circuits around the world, these spaces /non-places coexist anonymously, unrelated to any specific local identity, looking quite similar between them. On this kind of landscape, my work proposes a mathematical re-composition of their photographic image, using diverse graphic-manipulation operations that are based on arbitrary mathematical formulae of my design, and then extended on a photomontage that sets out a reconstruction of the urban space. I aim to put forward another version of the landscape that is more complex, more significant than the real referent image. By doing this, the construction of a fictive cityscape becomes possible.”


Jane ProphetDecoy2001, computer animation on DVD

Jane Prophet’s Decoy is an elegant and arresting deconstruction of some of the images and assumptions that have grown up around the phenomenon of the English landscape garden ever since the blueprint for this new-model landscape was first laid down by master designers such as ‘Capability’ Brown and Humphry Repton during the mid-eighteenth century.

At locations such as Blickling Hall and Holkham Hall in Norfolk and Wallington Hall in Northumberland, Prophet records a series of Arcadian vistas that have been more or less preserved in aspic. Within each view, Prophet morphs a number of digitally created changes to the landscape: returning an artificial lake to its original cover of woodland, replacing a man-made avenue of trees, and, in a cluster of startling images, projecting what the vista might look like in the not-too-distant future. The effect is both beguiling and disconcerting. Rather like the veil of computer-generated fog that drifts across a number of the scenes, Decoy creates a deliberate air of uncertainty, blurring the line between what we might normally recognise as nature and what we might readily identify as artifice.

By blurring artifice and nature Decoy fits perfectly into the context of Structurescapes. Our environment is so highly constructed that we can never be wholly sure what is fabrication. Decoy’s re-use of the idealised visions of great landscape designers from the eighteenth century further accentuates how our constructed environment is a constant rearranging of utopian visualizations.

Film and Video Umbrella commissioned Jane Prophet to make Decoy in 2001. This was a series of digital paintings that toured to several galleries in the UK and was accompanied by a Film and Video Umbrella publication.


Artist Biography

Jane Prophet (born Birmingham, 1964) works across a number of media, including sculpture, digital print and large-scale site-specific installation. Her work reflects a fascination with science and technology and this has resulted in interdisciplinary collaborations, for example with a mathematician and stem cell researchers.

As well as making installations in public spaces, Prophet has shown her work at Wysing Arts, Cambridge; Arnolfini, Bristol; Stedlijk Gallery, Amsterdam; ICA London and many other venues worldwide. Her work was the subject of a solo exhibition as part of the New Generation Arts Festival, Birmingham in 2008.

All text and images courtesy of the Film and Video Umbrella


Sinta WernerUntitled I,2008, Photo collage, 21 x 31 cmUntitled II2008, Photo Collage, 21 x 31 cmUntitled III2008, Photo Collage, 20 x 17 cm

Sinta Werner’s works deal with the concept of one-point-perspective, whereby she reflects on conventions of seeing and representing. Her aim is to sensitize the viewer’s perception, by wrongfooted expectation, by misled perspectival representation or by the creation of a stage-like space in between two and three-dimensions.

A central theme in her work is the illusion of space represented in a plane and the opposite - the illusion of flatness in space; she achieves this by different techniques such as collage, pictorial arrangements in space and scenographic installations involving geometrical structures as well as architectural elements. One main interest is to break the boundaries between genres such as painting, installation and architecture; another one is to create a feeling of instability by fragmenting a space.

Text Courtesy of the artist & NETTIE HORN, London

In this series of collages Werner builds an architectural construction through the assemblage of photographs. The fragmentation of space relays to us the fabrication of our environment and deception of our own spatial sphere. The deception of the created perspective also confronts the dystopian and utopian elements that Structurescapes explores.


Biography

Born in 1977 in Hattingen, Germany, Sinta Werner lives and works in Berlin.She achieved an MA in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College, London in 2007, a Meisterschülerprüfung at Universität der Künste, Berlin, in 2004. She also took part in an exchange program at Hunter College, New York in 2003 and took her Absolventenprüfung at UdK, Berlin in 2003. Werner has exhibited extensively in both solo and group shows in London, Edinburgh and Berlin.

Text Courtesy of the artist & NETTIE HORN, London

Artist Statement

“...I am engaged with the tradition of illusionistic painting, with one-point perspective and Alberti’s model of the visual pyramid. I am interested in the in-between-state between picture and space and therefore in principles known from stage design.” Sinta WernerText Courtesy of the artist & NETTIE HORN, London


AcknowledgementsDanielle Arnaud ContemporaryNettie HornThe Film and Video UmbrellaUECLAADavid CotterrellJane ProphetSinta WernerSachiyo NishimuraLeón FerrariThe Co-OpThe RangeWaitroseLinda Penhey and Sweet SuccessLloyd Oxley, Daniel Sly and Colchester InstituteJDS ResidentialUniversity of Essex CateringUniversity of Essex EstatesThe Headgate TheatreJames BarnardJessica KennyMatthew PooleMichaela GiebelhausenMin WoodDr Nathaniel ColemanSusan CrossProfessor Andrew TaylorJame MaclachlanPatel Taylor LLP

structurescapes book layout

Documents

imaginations of artists

industrialized society

perfect society

abstract beauty

distant landscape

distant future

david cotterrells roadrunner

social programs