exhibition

From the pneumatic turmoil of the tension workshop a shiny airtight meeting room suited for anyone from ordinary folks to inflated executives, is part of a show at Looking Glass. The silvery plastic film houses the bodies and heads of three people at a time for an intimate meeting in the shared chamber. This triangular starfish evolved out of the experiments of Linda Karlsson. Her inflated costumes started to swallow-up more and more people, duos and eventually trios.

Catherine Watling is an artist who specializes in inter-disciplinary work with a special interest in art/science based research. Her work predominantly focuses on the alternative and sensual use of digital tools to create interactive and immersive experiential environments. She is currently Associate Artist at the Junction, Cambridge and has recently been awarded an Arts Council Grant in order to attend the Kilwa Archaeological Survey as attached artist. She is also Co-Director of New Dust.

A bit of context on the work in progress...

Installation at the Balen festival Enschede, The Netherlands. 21-25 May 2008.

http://roombeek.nl/balenfestival/expositie/kunstenaarsinitiatieven.html

Sprinckelink is a collection of shows held in the front space of FoAM Lab in Amsterdam. In this former shoe shop a series of exhibitions has taken since May 2005. Visible from the street, a diverse program is offered to passers-by. Sprinckelinxkes are the old Dutch term for sparks that fly off. The lab-window serves as a portal for sparks to jump onto our neighbourhood inhabitants.

This exhibition by Jan Dietvorst at Foamlab is part of a series named the Solemnities follow the highlights of the Christian calendar.

This exhibition by Theun Karelse at Foamlab is part of a series named the Solemnities which follow the highlights of the Christian calendar.

This exhibition by Jan Dietvorst at Foamlab is part of a series named the Solemnities follow the highlights of the Christian calendar.

This exhibition by Jan Dietvorst at Foamlab is part of a series named the Solemnities follow the highlights of the Christian calendar.

This exhibition by Jan Dietvorst at Foamlab is part of a series named the Solemnities follow the highlights of the Christian calendar.

After the unique presentation of a group of six Asmat mask costumes from the collection of artist Jan Dietvorst, the idea surfaces to create a Christmas special of this show. One of the Jipae an Doroe is selected and placed in a forest of pine trees, as a true king. The whole of Foamlab is transformed into an evergreen forest from which the mask costume emerges. This show has become the start of a series of exhibitions at Foamlab commemorating the major feasts of the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar.

A large sheet of paper blocks the view through the window of Foamlab for passers by. Only a funny looking hole provides a glimpse of the world inside. This world sprung forth from the hands of Eva Klee, who returns for a few weeks to Foamlab. She used to have her studio there, but now she is building a town. Her residency is accompanied by a festive meal in the middle of her city, and several occasions for discussions and reflections on the work in progress.

This first show at Foamlab is probably a world premiere. From the collection of the Dutch artist Jan Dietvorst a group of six mask costumes known as Jipae and Doroe are shown together. In any anthropological collection shown world wide in museums you might see one or two of these Asmat artifacts, but a group of six is unheard of. A group like this would come together in an ‘Adoption feast’ where the relationships in family life are restored after the death of a family member.

Filmmaker Jan Cornelis Mol (1891-1954) was a pioneer of time-lapse photography, using it to record the tiny lives of micro-organisms. He wanted to show in film what otherwise would be visible only to the most tenacious gaze through a microscope. In this way the public was plunged into the life inside a droplet of water or sucked-up into the bloodstream of a frog. A highlight in his work are the images of crystallisation. Using common photographic chemicals his recordings under great magnification of the crystallisation processes revealed wonderful abstract patterns.

Stick three hexagons together and they form a 2-dimensional surface. Add a septagon in between and you end up with a warped picture. Any such connection where the angles at a vertex add-up to more than 360° curves into a plane that needs 3-dimensions to exist. This is the world of hyperbolics. At Stuk in Leuven, FoAM investigates these curved shapes in more detail. Material research is combined with topological intuitions to create extravagant entities that are reminiscent of coleslaw and sea-slugs.