cHURCH OF MONIKA – Stephan Wittmer: The (No)Show Project
February 19th: 11am- 1pm
excerpts from the book TIN CANS, objects and new impressions
Stephan Wittmer lives and works in Lucerne, Switzerland. He studied at the School of Design SfG in Lucerne. Since graduating (1982) he has been working as a freelance artist and as a facilitator of unusual art projects. Stay at the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris (1984 and 2023). In 1991 he received a Swiss Federal Art Scholarship for his photographic installations. Numerous exhibitions at Switzerland and abroad.
Co-founder of the Kunsthalle Luzern (1990). Founding partner and director of the PZK Plattform für zeitgenössische Kunst GmbH. Founder of the documentation center "diebasis", which is now located in the Kunsthalle Luzern. From 2001 to the end of 2007 Stephan Wittmer was the leading curator of the Kunstpanorama Luzern. Since 2003 he teaches at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in the course of studies Art & Mediation. Research work RiK – Regie in Komplizenschaft- experiences and perspectives of artistic projects between art and pubic spheres.
Member of the artist group S16. 2009 founding member of the Alpineum Produzentengalerie. Since 2012 he is editor of _957, an independent art magazine that is published monthly. To date, over 140 issues have been published. Initiation and management of Museum1 on the building wasteland 837 on the outskirts of Adligenswil (Lucerne).
www.stephanwittmer.ch
www.957.ch
www.redaktion.xyz
The Sky Crashing onto the Asphalt and Dissolving
Fragments of reality, taken from everyday life, look strange and inaccessible, but then also familiar and immanently ordinary. Each image is an attempt to redefine what is seen, to question it by not releasing from one’s thinking what has been registered by sight, to think it phenomenologically.
Stephan Wittmer deconstructs with his camera. He extracts details and places them in a new context. His photographic records are transformed poetic moments and analogies of composition and color.
On his research trip through America, the artist examines an entire system that reflects processes of appropriating and discarding cultural heritage.
The bottoms of two empty Styrofoam cups are encrusted with coffee. A round ceiling lamp glows next to them. Later: soft ice, the sky crashing onto the asphalt and dissolving. An eyeball floats in a sink, and we observe a bar of light aligning with the edge of a mattress. Plastic flowers grow in a cemetery, and a puppet warns of the dangers of vigilantism. Then there is a pile of colorful stuffed animals and a stack of fluffy synthetic blankets. A dozen pink boxes filled with eggs tower in the shelf of a supermarket. An empty desert road stretches out in front of us. The car becomes the permanent companion of the artist travelling across the land. Even the air conditioner and cables in cheap motels become part of an archive of material traces that are thought through artistically.
When the shutter release on the camera is pressed, a symbiotic relationship of documentation and fiction comes into being. The eyes understood as the mirror of the soul become a vessel for the search for the biographical reflection of the artist in the world that surrounds him. His personal journey as hero becomes a catalyst for a vision of the future that also wipes away the past. Through the lens to the inside: focus and sensor are calibrated to our way of seeing and become a representation of our selves.
Stephan Wittmer stops in his tracks and takes notice. Then he reacts and immediately takes a photograph. His images seem spontaneous and, because of that, fleeting. At the same time, this kind of randomness is grounded on a clear conceptual foundation: the moment that which seems obvious begins to crumble and allows us a glimpse behind what previously was hidden by its own stigma, a futuristic subject emerges, which in turn opens up a new dimension. We become aware how much of what we know we usually only perceive unconsciously. The everyday only becomes noteworthy when it is placed in a new context, when objects appear as something different from what they really are.
The piece of sky dissolving on the asphalt is a puddle; the oversize cartons of eggs turn out to be blinds in a bathroom, tomato soup lava, and the carpets hanging next to the street an outdoor gallery.
The utopian element of our own seeing is constantly activated. We keep getting a sense of loneliness that cannot quite reconcile the contrast of tristesse and idyll.
The artist takes us on a journey, but he also abandons us to deal with the riddles of his camera obscura , through which he filters the world anew. Something fragile resides between each batting of the lashes and makes our pupils supple. We want to be touched with our senses; we want to feel the plush blankets and smell the dust on the road; we want to be part of it all.
At the same time, we can view this series of image cycles with a certain distance and put them in a new order—we can construct our own personal memory game out of them.
As if piecing together a puzzle, we collect an entire series of temporary states and assemble them in such a way that we can participate in the journey beyond the visible. The abstraction of reality emerges from the separation of symbiotic parts, for which the given perspective is crucial. From what angle am I looking at something? Where do I stand? Is something looking at me? These questions work on two levels: the inside and outside enter a dialogue with each other and keep on overlapping. We are also continually reminded how much our eyes tend to see relationships they are used to seeing. We recognize a structure, a persistent frequency, and we follow it internally . By interrupting these known connections repeatedly and placing them in new contexts according to his own parameters, the artist forces us to refocus our gaze, which ultimately—and promptly but steadily—throws us back on ourselves.
-Valeska Marina Stach
