I'm an exhibition, Philipp Gasser

A light source, a pedestal, a shadow on the wall, Philipp Gassers installation "I'm an Exhibition" appears at first to be quite uncomplicated. However, the light source is not a spotlight, but a video projector. This produces fictive pictorial schemes which coming with the real shadow to create a small animation. In the interaction with its fictive shadow the pedestal seems to grow, to replicate or to become soft, like melting ice. An apparently graphic pattern mutates into a skyscraper, splits into twin towers, only to shrink again to its real size. People come and go , clouds gather, lighting flashes. "I'm an Exhibition" alternates between supercharged content and formalistic evacuation.

Gasser's installation stands in the tradition of the so-called "expanded cinema" of the 1970s. The pioneers of that period wanted to break out of filmic illusion into a realtime reference, and brought film away from the flat cinema screen into the threedimensional space of the museum. Gasser also plays with this entanglement of work, spectator and space. When our own shadows merge with the animated shadows of the projection we have become an integrated part of the artwork, whose meaning arises not through a relationship to an object presented to u, but which unfolds in the here and now as an interplay with our own associations and memories. That Gasser's play is around a pedestal and thus an embodiment of a surpassed tradition not without irony. "I'm an Exhibition" is permeated with the nonchalance of the next generation who now takes for granted the achivements of their elders.

Claudia Spinellin, "reprocessing reality", cathalogue

More information: http://www.reprocessingreality.ch/