TO SHARE THE LANDSCAPE - The G@llery Evason SIngapore

- A work situated on the boundaries of the exhibition space

“Open Space” the art exhibition venue at The G@llery Evason is slowly picking up steam. After shows earlier this year by Samuel Teo and LASALLE SIA – college of the arts and May’s graffiti extravaganza “Surfact Tension”, The G@llery Evason Singapore will host a visual light installation by visual artist and curator Nathalie Junod Ponsard from 01-25 June 2001.

“Open Space” will be the venue for Nathalie’s installation called “to share the landscape”. According to this French born artist, “Open Space” and The G@llery Evason are the perfect venue for this multi-media work. “To occupy a space with one or several lights, to be able to modify its volumes and the visitor’s usual vision of the space, is the origin of these installations of light. The selected spaces are not only “exhibition space”, museum or gallery space but they integrate natural or urban sites in which the installation merges “created technology versus natural.”

The vision behind the installation

Artificial or natural light acts as medium rather then canvas or other material. The installation plays with the change of scales and creates connections between sculpture and architecture with geometry as base. The geometrical structures come within strength in the space.

Highlighting a situation comes through bringing it to light, in the strict sense of the word. The viewer appropriates the visual proposal by entering visually into the lighting structures, appealing to the retina. What is to be perceived is a construction of space. At times, natural ambient light can bring a variation of intensity and color (course of the sun).

The choice of the lights is an abstract sign and functions most appropriate to point out the space. This lighting could also be seen as a paradox between the literal sense of the world and its components, as in the expression, “enlighten somebody about”. The lighting as a work of art becomes a metaphor of the philosophical activity.

Attached to immaterial and temporal, the entire works bends to the working drawing and reflection.

The installation

Monochromatic screens are exposed to the public gaze, on a diagonal line running around the external boundaries of the gallery. It is like a topology of assembled plans of transparent sheets, colored in various ways depending on their direction and fitted together along a continuous line.

The gallery space is a transparent and geometric volume like a partition on the floor supporting a building.

A color filter covers each facade. Primary colors used are: yellow, red and blue. The space will achieve the chromatic mixes: orange, purple and green. During daytime, the sunlight projects the colored shadows inside the space. The shadows mix and move while at night, they are projected outside the space around the gallery.

The diagonal line running around the facades create an opening onto the architecture while hiding or transforming part of it. It changes our usual vision of the exhibition space. Strong and dynamic, the diagonal cuts the vertical space in two (image of the architecture as a usable thing).

This installation which not only be seen from the road outside “Open Space”, but also be seen from inside, bringing a new understanding of inside and outside.

The visitor dives into a colored bath for a visual and sensorial experience of the eye, of the sight. Color filters split and reconstitute the light and, play on the site/architecture’s shadow and light.

The visitor’s eye is invited to go through the screens to come back on its monochromatic edge. Instantaneously visible landscape is behind the colored screen and as result gives to the space occupied by the work a fluctuating appearance. The screen idea generates numerous centering and de-centering. The eye dives into the screen to guess an image of an uncertain space in which we are included.

This work on the boundaries allows us to ponder over the urban landscape and not just have the installation sharing it.

Natalie Junod Ponsard has exhibited extensively in Europe and Asia.