"Ranunculus asiaticu"

Video (HD720p), 1:33 min, loop

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. […]
The videos show short performances in which the artist acts with the objects in the room and the modelled sunlight. The video "crop" exposes the fake with the shadow. It first shows a plant in a grey pot with its grey shadow, one can see the window with the stencil. The artist comes with planting utensils. She takes away the flower pot, the shadow remains. She moves the pot to another place, the shadow remains. She takes the plant out of the grey pot and plants it in a red one. She puts it in the first position of the plant in the grey pot. After 3 minutes, the shadow is the same as at the beginning. The artist cleans up. The video "Ranunculus asiaticus" works in a similar way. An empty vase of flowers casts the yellow shadow of what appears to be a yellow flowering plant, but is not even there. The artist fills orange flowers into the vase - the situation remains unchanged despite the artist's different actions. [...]
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)