"Refenestration" @ Tif Sigrids

Owen Kydd

Window Horizontal Vertical, 2016

Video on square display with media player

Edition 1 + 1AP

18 x 18 x 8 inches

Martin Elder

pr61 (window blind), 2016

Pigment print on fiber-based paper

30 x 40 inches

Peter Holzhauer

Bakery Window, 2016

Archival Inkjet Print

40.5 x 31.5 inches

Uta Barth

Untitled (composition #5), 2011

Inkjet print, lacquered wooden frames

23 x 21.875 inches

Perception of time is as much a part of spatial depth as it is duration. Certainly, looking through a window (some kind of framed opening) reveals as much, whether the window be an actual window or some kind of proposal about a window and its condition (material, framing, filtering, optics, optical technologies, etc... and resultant outputs).  

Kydd shows us the slippery flicker of fleeting time as it pertains to watching our main metric of time (sunlight) dip to and from the horizon (sunrise or sunset); the camera aperture (window) reflected by the solar flares, all contained in a light box.  Depth is emphasized spatially and time stutters rather than stands still.

Elder's "window" is a closed blind that blocks most of the outside light save the leaks around the edges whereby the frame is proposed to be immaterial (light/color) and the material aspect of light and the shortcomings of digital cameras reveals the grain inherent in such relations as it abrades agains the surface of the blind and so reflects the photographic print itself. Here time can be thought about as a subject as it relates to technology.

Holzhauer's image recalls, for me, some of the recent Valerie Green work from Moskowitz Bayse that I posted just before this one (see here).  A scattering of objects (consumable items) fill the picture plane, one here which suggests atmospheric perspective from the bottom and so by the relative size (greater to small) of the pictorial data.  Hence, the view in this "window" is tilting from above and time is therefore suggested by movement, itself registered by way of relative size and position change. 

Finally, Barth's photographs capture light as it comes through a window and lands on cabinetry; it's depth is suggested geometrically through line and shape of the drawers along the right hand side and time is the moment that cameras tend to capture so well.  As with Holzhauer, the grayscale recalls earlier times of photograph (his not unlike how early photography created photograms with real objects) but I also suspect that her photograph is in "color" despite the scheme as I assume the cabinetry/drawers to actually be white, and, of course, the reflected light as well.

So, in each of these artworks, moments in time are punctuated by certain technologies and it is the window that frames the work and is the frame.  In the first, it is a view onto a landscape stuck in a moment widely to considered to that of great beauty, the ecstatic not the static, perhaps.  In the second, the window is closed, yet there is still much interior light.  In the third, the window seems most like what glass does that is lain flat; it becomes a shelf or a place to scatter and scan, that is to say sort through the artifacts.  In the last one, the window is assumed by the presence and framing of light; it is present even in its absence, so to speak.  As  reflect on these pictures within pictures, it's really hard not to default to such a cliche as windows of time (certainly signs of our time), but then again, it seems very apropos, especially instances given over to instants like never before.