Anja Mahler

Artist Statement

 

At its core, my work is an exploration of our perception of reality. As such I am interested in the fluidity of our understanding of realness. It is an engagement with the binaries inherent within our engagement of the real, the subjective/objective. My work intends to evoke a tactile substance beyond our reach, a communication which elicits other senses of communication. It's drawing on states, which are at once mutable and immutable, boundless and bounded, permeable and solid.

 

Through a visual mapping of space my work explores unfamiliarity within the familiar. My finished work is procedural, relying on the experience of perception. The presented work often exists in a state of flux, an intentional ambiguity that produces pluralities of meanings. Continuous and overlapping understandings or experiences of the work are the desired outcome.

 

For the moment my work is presented as installations, utilizing the moving image as a means to engage with duration and perception. My medium is light and its reflection/refraction. What emerges is a visual mapping of light. Overall, from research to presentation, my practice is a concise process, a calculated engagement of a chosen space or scenario. One may use the word ‘ritual' or ‘ritualistic' in describing a process which meticulously and repeatedly charts the progression of natural light across a controlled environment.

 

Process is fundamental to my practice. At the stage of research my concern is synchronicity and frequency. For example, the process involved in the work, ‘This earth might be uninhabited' involved the location of a light frequency which corresponds to that of the alpha brain wave function (state of somnolence with reduced consciousness). Once noted, the experiment is repeated, a process in which all environmental factors are taken into consideration. For example, in which direction the light enters the chosen space from, the time and date of observation and the metrological conditions.
It is within a close noting of the real, through exactness and repetition, a revelation is conjured.

 

www.anjamahler.com