"DAWN"

acrylic glass, dispersion paint, fog machine

Based on concepts of the Ideal Landscape of the 16th century and romanticisation in landscape painting from the early 19th century until well into the age of industrialisation, my works generate depoliticised substitute worlds that exist detached from the respective living and power relations of the visualised landscape.
The characteristic of landscape as a construct of politically formed subjective perception is broken up and transformed into a virtual simulation of landscape. Mechanisms of representation of reality and its manifestations as well as the human desire for unspoiled experience of nature lead to the creation of surrogates.
The installative object DAWN pretends to be a landscape photography and works mainly with the imagination of the viewer, who has to create the shown landscape to an essential part by himself in his imagination.
The visualised image is thus different for everyone, not only because the work, like a film, never stands still, but also because what is seen is unconsciously compared with already internalised landscape images of dawn.
The basic framework of the work is formed by an acrylic glass showcase (100 x 150 cm) and a fog machine. The wall behind the work DAWN is painted in the same format as the showcase in front of it. The green wall colour is representative of the idealised representation of a natural landscape at dawn. The fog machine fills the showcase completely with fog, so that the colour of the back wall is temporarily no longer visible.  In the course of time the fog sinks further and further, thus releasing the perspective into the abstracted landscape. A horizon line forms, which is supposed to remind of a landscape covered with morning fog.
In a figurative sense the fog describes the state of error, uncertainty, unconsciousness, lost and loneliness. But fog is also a symbol for the transition from one state to another and also for the grey zone between reality and unreality or the state of vagueness and fantasy. According to mythological imagination, fog is the primordial substance of the world. In the fairy tales of Central Europe, fog stands for the uncertainty of people about what is to come and what is beyond. A state that can only be broken through enlightenment.
(Philipp Pess, 2017)