Saskia Noor van Imhof, #+40.00 (Installation View), via Art Observed
Making for the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City, artist Saskia Noor van Imhoff has orchestrated a captivating, otherworldly environment in the basement of Grimm Gallery downtown. The artist, who frequently works with ideas of “hidden” or obfuscated practices and points of origin for her work, here creates a space that defies easy categorization, instead challenging the viewer to pass through the spaces and observe the works, coaxing a narrative out of their beguiling arrangements.
Saskia Noor van Imhof, #+40.00 (Installation View), via Art Observed
Van Imhoff applies a sense of tension and pressure to existing artworks and artifacts, allowing the relationships between disparate elements, and their presence in conjunction within her built environment to drive a deeper inquiry into presentations of space and of narrative. Allocating them a new place in her installations composed of sculptures, found objects and photographs, which are gathered online and culled from archives documenting previous exhibitions. The resulting individual works, assemblages and environments subsequently form new ‘constellations’ or self-referencing systems. As much a document as an object existing in the present, these works work through and rework previous concepts, rendering the space as a timeless site accented by its layout in this current show.
Saskia Noor van Imhof, #+40.00 (Installation View), via Art Observed
For this exhibition, the floor is covered from wall to wall in salt. Clusters of plaster sculptures, objects and neon lines seem to be scattered around the salt surface, in order to slow down their inevitable process of decay. The neon lines are sketched in the space as liquid light frozen in time, melted over and through the different artifacts. Like constellations hardened under sheets of ice they seem to be indefinitely contained in their current state. However, salt is a material impervious to one single meaning in that it both conserves and degenerates. While it is used to preserve, it also erodes landscapes and can eat its way through seemingly impenetrable plates of steel.
Saskia Noor van Imhof, #+40.00 (Installation View), via Art Observed
In a similar way, van Imhoff’s show dissolves preconceived boundaries. The viewer and the gallery environment form an integral part of this work. The staircase is illuminated by radiating magenta bars of light- normally used to artificially accelerate the growth process of crops and plants, the lights inscribe an afterimage onto the viewer’s gaze. After descending the stairs and stepping into the salt- filled space, an internal green filter colorizes the viewer’s sight. Each aspect of movement and engagement is highlighted by neons, as if to accent the viewer’s points of access, then trouble them with the ever-present spectacle of the salted floor. The artist not only places her work in a state of flux, the space itself seems to be a counteracting technique, as if the preservation and decay this material is simultaneously able to produce, ultimately presents an echo of her own attempt to conceptualize and represent her own body of work, to both preserve it and break it into something new.
The show closes December 14th.
— C. Rheinhardt
Read more:
Saksia Noor van Imhoff: “#+40.00″ [Grimm]
