Claude Collins-Stracensky
Galleria Nicoletta Rusconi, Milan, Italy
‘Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavour to understand reality, we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch.’ This famous metaphor, used by Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld in their collaborative publication on the theory of relativity, The Evolution of Physics (1938), lies at the heart of Claude Collins-Stracensky’s latest work, which looks to expand our phenomenological and psychological understanding of reality.
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For his first European solo show, the American artist has created an installation that functions as the ‘watch’, in which the visitor’s experience is transformed through the application of the natural forces of light, energy, time and space. Instead of trying to imagine the internal mechanism of the watch, however, visitors are asked to follow a succession of optical reflections devised by Collins-Stracensky, which establishes a tension between the internal arena of the exhibition space, the external environment of the city and the consciousness of the viewer.
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A number of mirrored discs hang from the ceiling in various corners of the gallery, casting reflections on both sides of the exhibition space and of the visitors moving within it. The mirrors are strategically placed to lead the eye on a single route through the three rooms of the gallery, discovering the other works in the exhibition along the way. These range from some artist’s photographs of Ikebana floral arrangements to other photographic images portraying alchemical natural ephemera: Untitled (The Willing Suspension (of Disbelief) (2007), for example, ‘eternalizes’ in a single shot the seemingly impossible equilibrium of a delicate cobweb resisting the force of gravity to suspend a number of tiny twigs in the empty void of an upturned glass. His ‘vitrine sculptures’ – small- and medium-scale abstract architectural forms in metal and glass containing shells, branches, leaves and dried herbs – develop Collins-Stracensky’s game of reflections and the process by which it expands the viewer’s vision.
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Following the artist’s cues, visitors will ultimately find themselves before the last work in the show, Energetic Return 1 (2010), in which the artist has covered one of the gallery windows with transparent, fuchsia-coloured plastic, leaving only a small circular gap. This creates a type of viewfinder directed towards the florist’s stall across the street from the gallery, through which the goings-on of the outside world can be observed. At the same time, the fuchsia tinge cast by the plastic modifies the viewer’s perception of light, conferring a new view on both the place and the works. The entire project constitutes a device capable of expanding visual space and time, transforming the environment into a camera lucida that elicits a different awareness of being.
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In this project – as in his 2009 solo show at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles – Collins-Stracensky uses the gallery to re-create a large-scale version of one of his ‘vitrine sculptures’, in which every perspective – whether interior or exterior to the exhibition space (or to the individual art work) – is multiplied, inviting the viewing public to reach beyond the confines of an everyday understanding of things.
Translated by Rosalind Furness
Marinella Paderni
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