Evelena Ruether
Working Artist Statement
I am investigating the core principles through which we understand looking at images and objects. In an information age where we need only a brief moment to absorb visual information and read a message, my goal is to explore and question how we have come to know these things, and escape the default readings to which we may often turn. I do this by blurring the lines that divide sculpture from photography.
The art objects in the room are always accompanied by an awareness of the space. The site specificity of each installation will allow a convergence between the art pieces and the walls or floors that surround them. In Left to Our Own Devices, a photographic print takes the form of a large “frame” nearly ten feet wide with a variable height according to the vertical height of the wall. The top portion of the image always remains against the ceiling, and the bottom edge remains on the floor. At the same time, a large void is created in the space where the work of art would reside, bringing the viewer’s attention to the wall. Both in the formal construction of the piece and in the “image,” the condition of the gallery wall is brought forward.
In At a Level two prints face each other. One is mounted or hanging from the ceiling, and the other lies directly on the floor. The space between the two images becomes activated, and the viewer begins to have a physical bodily relationship with something as familiar as ‘works on paper.’ A similar experience occurs within Surprise Nothing, as the viewer walks through a projection of light and stands inside a circle that is created by a half circle of mylar. We would sooner experience the mylar as a physical material and the light as an element, an immaterial element, however when the two forms meet to complete a cyllinder, and the viewer uses their body to pass through the light, the experience of the light is just as concrete as the mylar- the light becomes physical.
The works that use light as a material form are tied just as much to photography as the works that may have more obviously photographic elements present, such as a print. Light is at the source of everything that comes through our eyes, without it we would not have sight, without it the world would be a vast black nothing. A close technical understanding of light came out of a photographic background, and it now comes into play as a material, as a physical element to work with.
These formal concerns ground my process and approach to creating objects. The content of the work varies to address ideas of comfort and home, family and loss, and public versus private, while the question of the condition of viewing a work of art is maintained. In Continued Retention a cube of shipping pallets houses images of an interior space filled with stacked boxes, crates, and other forms of containment. The images are on two inner sides of the cube while the other sides are illuminated and the entire object glows. The cube rumbles and groans loudly, the sounds of machinery, exhaust, and screeching fills the entire room. There is a push and pull between the glow of the box and the uncomfortable noise that cannot be avoided, the object has its own presence, you feel you are in company of a living, breathing thing.
This is also an example of the self-referentiality used between image and object; the pallets are meant for containing, and they have now become a cube for containing, and the images reiterate again the idea of containment, while bringing in the idea of an interior space as a container. It is this that then leads to thinking about the room that you are in while experiencing the object, and also back to the fact that all works of art are crated and shipped at one point, will these palates one day be packed within more palates?
By examining how we engage and perceive a lived history and the experience of a space, I strive to create an experience for the viewer that is not unrelated to more casual interactions that take place within our daily lives. By spending time with objects and delving deep into an investigation of how it is that we understand them, we may come to have a better understanding of the larger world in which we live.