Anke van Oostveen, Maarten Buser en Jeroen Huisman in Gegroeide Tijd
Time is open to interpretation. We all experience it differently, yet we all live by it—some more loosely and indulgently, others more strictly and efficiently. Time accumulates in layers of successive moments while, at the same time, eroding our lives. Human time plays almost no part in the vastness of the universe; in that sense, everything we experience passes in an instant. And yet, the time allotted to us offers ample room for condensation, magnification, and interpretation.
Anke, Maarten, and Jeroen came together for this exhibition to explore the subject through free association. Anke and Maarten, both poets and writers, did so through text and images, while Jeroen worked primarily with images.
We chose the View-Master as our medium because it is an iconic, nostalgic relic of childhood—a device through which we once discovered entertaining or unfamiliar worlds. Although we belong to different generations, we all grew up with this wondrous object. Looking into a View-Master takes you somewhere else, if only for a moment. The seven pairs of images on each reel—as the round slide holders are called—allowed us to forget about time for a while.
Anke van Oostveen wrote several essays on time and photographed situations in which a scene unfolds in a brief moment. Taking a photograph gave her a fleeting grasp on time: for a moment, the moment became hers as an image. By inviting others to view those same photographs through the View-Master, she gives that time—and what happened within it—away. Each viewer sees their own version: a moment that arises anew and differently in every pair of eyes.
Maarten Buser regularly photographs strange things he encounters on the street, preferably (textual) instructions that are somehow illogical. The View-Master’s mechanism reminds him of cinematic editing techniques, an important source of inspiration for his poetry. By assembling the reels, he was able to apply those techniques visually, too, inviting viewers to see whether they can create their own story or “film” from each sequence of images.
For this project, Jeroen Huisman selected images from his photo project Fragmented City. During city walks, he focuses on the ground like an archaeologist, searching the layer where abandoned human-made objects and impressions enter into a kind of courtship with nature.
No comments:
Post a Comment