Two Student Curatorial Team members, Abi Dryburgh and Lucas Battich, cast their eye on Kathrin Sonntag's
I SEE YOU SEEING ME SEE YOU, 28 February - 8 April, Cooper Gallery, DJCAD and wrote these pieces for Cooper Gallery Notes... Get involved with the conversation on
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| Kathrin Sonntag, I SEE YOU SEEING ME SEE YOU, Cooper Gallery, 2014 |
I saw this and thought of you
A fun, minimal look (sic) at the representation of objects.
Inspired by a trip to a glass eye factory, Kathrin Sonntag has created a
reflexive installation that stares back at the viewer and makes you question
the very mechanisms by which you understand the work. Addressing the innate
human need to make links and connect like with like, visual connections are
taken to their most basic level – a clementine sits on orange paper, a green
spray bottle stands next to a colour-matched smear on a clear pane. Plain
coloured fields pepper the walls and bring to mind Pantone swatches and their
attempt to make organised sense of the colour spectrum.
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Kathrin Sonntag, I SEE YOU SEEING ME SEE YOU, Cooper Gallery, 2014
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The placements of matching pigments, colours and shapes next
to objects that they recall if anything make me think about how dubious the
validity of representational painting is today. When a stout coffee cup can
evoke an eyeball or a flat square of brown quite clearly represents wood, what
is the point in elaborating in more detail? There is great power in
simplifying, and this exhibition is a strong example.
For me the most arresting work in the room is the mirror
that has been masked in the middle by what is essentially a rectangular paper
cataract. In a room filled with prosthetic eyes, it is a stark reminder of how
precious eyesight is for those of us lucky enough to have it.
Abi Dryburgh,
Level Four, Fine Art, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design
Kathrin
Sonntag, I See You Seeing Me See You
During the fifth
century BCE the Greek philosopher Empedocles first suggested what later came to
be known as the extramission theory of visual perception. The theory was best
developed by Plato, who argued on the existence of an internal fire issuing
from our eyes as a visual stream (Timaeus
45b-c), which by touching objects allowed us to perceive them. This idea was only
refuted many centuries later by modern science. However, even though mistaken
in its physical aspects, the theory has its correlative in the way we move and
focus our eyes, the way our embodied subject constructs the world around us, to
an extent governed by cultural and social habits, rather than passively receiving
factual information. These varied concerns are put into play in Kathrin Sonntag’s
installation I See You Seeing Me See You.
This
immersive installation is centered around the leitmotif of the prosthetic eye.
The exhibition includes numerous references to the history of the glass eye in
Lauscha, a small German town where prosthetic eyes were invented, and also home
to traditional doll’s eyes manufacturers. Featuring a range of photographic and
sculptural works, everyday objects, sets of display cases and slide
projections, the installation creates an atmosphere reminiscent of a workshop,
or rather a laboratory, that connects with Lauscha’s history.
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| Kathrin Sonntag, I SEE YOU SEEING ME SEE YOU, Cooper Gallery, 2014 |
The varied composition
of objects creates playful and compelling visual propositions, highlighting at
times unexpected similarities. Everyday objects, such as a light bulb, a bouquet
of flowers, a broom, are juxtaposed in such ways that their familiarity borders
into alterity. The act of seeing (and of being seen) is put in relation with
the Freudian notion of the uncanny, where objects retain a sense of the
ordinary, while at the same time are distorted into something that seems
foreign, unfamiliar, alien. This notion is also increased by the recurrence of
glass eyes throughout the exhibition, which gives these inanimate objects the
unsettling impression of having their own agency. Frames constitute another recurrent feature,
as a structure that guides the eye into certain details or sections in the
installation and gallery space, which seem to remind us that much is a stake
depending the angle from which things are perceived. The photographic act of
framing is also recalled with the inclusion of camera lenses and a 1930s book
on the optics of photography, aptly titled
Das
Auge Meiner Kamera [
The Eye of the
Camera].
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Kathrin Sonntag, I SEE YOU SEEING ME SEE YOU, Cooper Gallery, 2014
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Monochrome surfaces,
including paper, painting on walls and glass, and even projected to the gallery
wall on a slide projector, seem to give a nod to the long history of monochrome
painting during modernism (Frank Stella statement on trying “to keep the paint
as good as it was in the can” finds its echo in an actual can of paint
positioned next to a painted shape on the wall), while establishing particular
areas or regions within the gallery, each with its dominant colour. These
chromatic arrangements give the spatial installation both a musical and
cinematic quality, highlighting the temporal aspect of the eye’s journey
through the exhibition.
Plato’s proposition on
visual perception may not hold as a scientific description, but in its
metaphorical sense it seems to come alive in this exhibition, where Sonntag
cleverly weaves a wide range of visual elements to engage us on the act of
seeing.
