"Taraxacum sect. Ruderalia #1"

pigmentbased inkjet print on aluminum Dibond

The work was shown in the exhibition Broken Flowers at Korridor - Raum für aktuelle Kunst as part of the photography festival FotoWien from 16 June to 8 July 2023.

The artist's works are particularly suited to the photo festival theme "The Lies of Photography", which is about the authenticity of photography, about being and appearances, about reality and illusion - a topic that has been up for discussion since the invention of photography and on which one can still find new aspects today, and perhaps especially today. Liddy Scheffknecht exhibits here mostly newly created photo sequences, individual photo works and videos as well as wax crayon drawings. The interdisciplinary artist deals with the perception of reality, time and space in a playful and experimental way, using unusual materials such as sunlight, shadows and the rotation of the earth. We see situations that do not seem quite unusual at first, but in which something is nevertheless strange.
In various ways, she has tried in the past to transfer photography, which can only fix a moment in time, into the cinematic. Photography is enriched by her with a filmic-moving component and can now seemingly represent the impossible, time as a process in the photographic image. On the one hand, she succeeded in doing this with photographs onto which she projected the changing outline of the shadows of the sitter (and thus apparently passing time) and thus achieved space-time constructs between reality and fiction. These are not exhibited here. Another possibility is to depict the passage of time in photographic sequences.
This exhibition is called "Broken Flowers". Broken: this means: a brokenness of the situation. It is not about looking at what is real or fake in the usual sense, because everything we see is real and true, even if it is, let's say 'fake'. What the photographs tell us is a truth constructed by Liddy Scheffknecht; if we want to 'read' these images, it is a matter of recognising what the artist wants to say. Flowers - all the pictures show plants, but these do not refer to any aspect of nature or the like, but are to be understood purely as objects. Due to their transience, however, the aspect of time rests more strongly in them than in everyday objects.
Here, mainly photo sequences and video works from the group of works "Sun Works" are shown, poetic situations between being and appearance with sunlight and the rotation of the earth as protagonists. These are based on installations: First, objects - here potted plants or cut flowers and supposedly their shadows - are installed in the room. For this purpose, (analogue) stencils made of paper or foil are mounted on a nearby window in the outline shape of the respective object or plant. When the sun shines through the window, the shadows of the paper or foil fall into the room. The earth's rotation moves the manipulated light and shadow image, which constantly changes shape, through the room until the projection seems to dock with the object/plant. For a moment the situation seems to fit, for a moment the illusion is perfect - namely when the shaped shadow falls in such a way that it looks as if it were the real shadow of the plant. For her installations, Liddy Scheffknecht chooses very specific spaces and yet, even inside, she is dependent on the weather, the sunlight and the times of day, which can often lead to a prolonged process. Over the years, Liddy Scheffknecht has expanded these irritations with a great deal of experimentation. If we look closely at the pictures, there is a different deception everywhere, but all with the same intention: they ask us to look closely and to realise again and again how unstable our perception is.
We see the photo of a flowering yellow dandelion bouquet with a dark shadow, diagonally opposite hangs the photo of dandelions with a dark shadow as well. If we look closely, both shadows belong to the blossoming flowers in terms of their outlines. The shadow is a construction in every respect. While the shadows in her works have so far mostly been dark as in reality, in some they are now coloured, as for example in the series of the flowering lilac (syringa), which is even extremely coloured and yet one must first realise that it is - through the use of coloured stencils on the window - fake. Or in the case of Campanula addenda, which casts a coloured shadow, which cannot be twice, as it is no longer even in flower. Another level opens up in the three-part photographic work (2014) "Ceci n'est pas une plante", which - following Magritte's pipe - places object, image of object and text - in a seemingly contradictory context. Here Scheffknecht lets the two-dimensional photo of a rubber tree cast a shadow. A double irritation. But the illusion is also broken again by revealing the photograph to be a construct through subtle drop shadows. [...]
Liddy Scheffknecht has used a great deal of ingenuity to create situations that she simultaneously creates and breaks, all with the intention of pointing out to us how relative what we see and perceive is.
(from the opening speech by Petra Noll-Hammerstiel, 15.6.2023, read the whole speech here in German)