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The young German artist Johannes Vogl works with installations
in the public space that offer a temporally and spatially
transposed representation of natural subjects by means of
light boxes. Hereby, the viewer’s position in space
is essential. Only this aspect relates the installed picture
in a surprising way to the space surrounding it. The artist
himself locates his work in the tradition of landscape painting,
which he resumes in an updated framework and furnishes with
a reflexive twist for the viewers. The chosen picture has
the appearance of a random photographic section from a nature-like
environment. Yet it is essential for Johannes Vogl that the
pictures are no photographic or typographic reproductions
but hand drawings created in the so-called scratch drawing
technique. First of all, the surface of acrylic glass is
completely blackened; later one scratches the color partially
from the glass using scalpels and palette knives. Thus one
creates a black-and-white drawing with strong contrasts.
For the construction site installation Fünf Monde [Five
Moons] four tower cranes that will already be at work on
a construction site in a Vienna inner city district will
be used. Usually large advertising light boxes showing the
logos of the participating building enterprises are mounted
at the level of the cranes’ arms. |
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The artist is going to replace four of these light displays
with drawings of a full moon. During the night and when the
cranes are out of order, the light boxes will align with
the wind parallel to each other, so that the drawings will
always point in the same direction varying according to the
wind direction thus bringing forth their effect in different
views of the city. Hence four additional moons shall appear
on the horizon of the city beside the real one when it is
dark – hence the project’s title Fünf Monde
[Five Moons].
In Vienna the building enterprise PORR has agreed to support
the project and to install it on one of their upcoming construction
sites in 2006. The requirement that four cranes have to be
located on one construction site limits the choices considerably
but in 2006 PORR opens several construction sites of this
size in the inner districts of Vienna. As the dates for the
opening of such construction sites are often fixed on short
notice, the exact timeline of the project depends on the
day when an appropriate construction site in the inner city
area of Vienna can be adapted.
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transl. ol |
