Daniel von Sturmer
Set Piece
Site Gallery 5 Sep - 31 Oct 2009
Published in a-n magazine 2009
http://www.a-n.co.uk/publications/a-n_magazine
The gallery brings about different expectations to the roadside or adjacent cafe. Within its secure physical and contextual boundaries, is our attention drawn away from the space directly towards the works it houses? This suggestion is toyed with by Australian artist Daniel von Sturmer, who’s Set Piece draws our attention cyclically towards an installation of video works and the spatial arrangement of Site Gallery itself, toppling and re-presenting the context as an arena of subjectivity and ambiguity.
We initially encounter one of three walls constructed by Von Sturmer to occupy the centre of the space, stretching far above head height and creating a course around the gallery along which his video works are positioned. Shades and depths white create an unstable perception of distance until - clack, looking left, a small translucent screen insinuates itself into the space from his ‘temporary architecture’. Bright rectangular blocks form an orderly line in the centre of a white backdrop. Two fall, landing on a suggested lower surface. Clack, tap. Two more, another three, until the entire row lies in disarray on the lower edge of the screen. The depth is unclear, were they suspended? Perhaps they lay flat on an unseen plane. They vanish, the white greys.
Continuing around the space, this puzzling spatial game develops. A second screen presents a landscape of geometrical checks onto which a series of lightweight shapes are pushed. They disappear, reappearing in different formations. A third protrudes from the triangular internal structure. Here a series of cubes fall from an unseen location, padding and thudding nonchalantly into a colourful pile. Their dimensions remain questionable and their course to the ground hypnotic, their sounds holding a satisfyingly rhythmic synergy. A fourth screen shows another gridded surface, this time balls of bluetack and orange fuzz struggle up the side of a length of chalk, finally jumping to reach the summit.
The artists control unveils itself, we catch on. Simple editing tricks and magnets worked masterfully into subtle moments of intrigue and momentarily warped spatial awareness. Heightened in an adjoining room, the centre of a wall approaches us, coming to a point either side of which two monitors depict objects pushed, sucked and shot through curious tubes.
Von Sturmer’s work embeds itself in the gallery experience, asserting a bridge between art work and context through playful insertions of visual and spatial anomaly. His videos are smart and irreverent constructions of seemingly sporadic movement and uncertain scale and depth, joining architectural interventions to play a game of space and minutiae. Referencing the gallery’s physical and contextual systems, work and space and amalgamated, bent into a new composition that distorts our expectations in an alternate proposal. Using everyday motifs and materials, Set Piece questions a gallery space’s distinctness, suggesting its subtle and knowingly evident illusions.
Copyright C A Morgan 2009
