ambiguity

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cosmina ciocan

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rayzor.....nifellheim......emperor shawa

Rayzor

Landmark is something you refer to, tend to, is the place from where you begin. Something you measure with, which limits and creates an acceptable world by the illusion of order. In the absence of the landmark the one engaged in searching, the one who wants to find a meaning, a way, a God, looses his direction wandering in a space with no north. It becomes vital to identify a landmark when between the searcher and his target interferes a syncope (sign cope) like a wandering in the mist. Feeling uncomfortable, you become more aware, your senses are stretched out, your instances are activated.

If the searching and wondering would not had existed, the landmark would became an abstraction, an useless mark. It might appear paradoxical but getting lost in the fog is more about becoming aware rather than becoming disorientated. The fog impose a new way of orientation. Is exactly what James Turell try to do in an innocence-less game in which the art object is the act of perception itself. His intention is to wake up what is fallen asleep or deep forgotten in our habitudes. Making use of  one's judgment,  Rayzor installation, shown in Antony d'Offay Gallery in 1991, overturns the environment perception giving a floating feeling to a wall, by the use of  light and fog.

The experiment is based on the physical expression of the light and on the dissolved materiality of the wall. Turell claims his intention of  space disorientating the viewer while making him feel the light physicality at the edge of touching it. He give an interesting story about a group of children he had to show around in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and to answer their questions. One of the children wanted to know how much the light weight. Another one asked how he could wash off the light in case he would pass by in front of a projection camera.

Nifellheim

 

You may accept images but you might not give them only one meaning. You even don't want to. This images remain open into yourself. You discover many more meanings for the foggy image and you don't stop at any one particularly but find delight in the fog ambiguity full of possibilities and options. The fog conditions a continuously changing reality and imposes a new reading, again and again. A new writing. Composing and de-composing. Any traditional museum follows the objects presentation. Fjaerland Ice Museum follows an array of  world landscapes. The basis of this Svere Fehn project is the idea of glacier perceived as a huge mass of snow and ice hiding a puzzle of the past in an imagery scene. In a dialog with the north light, the space museum becomes a piece of art expressing the necessity of turning the visible into invisible, turning the ineffable into concrete. The fog packing the museum originates in Nifellheim, the underworld, the north world of frost, fog and ice.

Emperor Shawa

Because of the fractal, discrete and sinuous nature of the fog it transforms the enclosed space in a different  from the Euclidean, isotropic and homogeneous one. Decoded in an oriental manner the fog expresses the deep unity of the real, of the one with the whole. Existence without consistency, the fog reveals the absence by the absolute ubiquity of what it is everywhere without being anywhere. The fog is a symbolic image of the unity melting in a whole and into one self; a image of a soul freed from the karmic chain of  reincarnation.

You breath fog. You are enclosed by fog. Then the sacredness transforms from convention into live through. The fog sculptor Fujiko Nakaya realized a metaphorical cosmogonic space in the Fog Forest Park, the emperor's Shawa memorial. The profane space becoming incorporeal, gains a new level of existence and understanding. Cosmological personage, the king is invested with deity like power. The fog forces you to feel its presence by its absence.

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translated by letitia barbuica