2005 The Gallery

Installation, 5 large-size digital prints on wood
DOB Gallery, Belgrade, 2005

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GALLERY and ENTRANCE

 

 

 

The work “Gallery” presents photographs of parts of the outer gallery walls’ side, which are put on corresponding places on the inner sides of the same wall. What the visitor sees are life-size images of parts of a restaurant salon, office, elevator, and man and woman restroom.
The situation the visitor faces in the beginning of the work “Entrance” is the locked front door to the gallery; it can only be entered through a back door. Once entered the gallery, the visitor finds it completely empty. The lights are on. The situation is open, completely potent, but emptied. During the lasting of the exhibition I set special lights into the gallery window and the entrance door-frame. The special lights on the entrance make a “light wall” which enables the gaze towards inside and towards outside.
In both situations the gallery itself does not give any more information but exposing itself.
The comparison of walls and walls is imposing itself after some observation of the gallery space: confronting two sides of the same wall also confronts two realities, which usually have no other meeting points but the wall itself – it is made to separate and by its essence
it divides opposites. By feeling and exploring the surface which divides what we call ‘a gallery’ from ‘the real world’, one can see how fragile that border line actually is.
In the case of ‘Gallery’ and ‘Entrance’ I am dealing with the mental image of the BORDER,
and with what divides two wholes. In the case of ‘Gallery’ it was the walls, and in the case of ‘Entrance’ it was the entrance itself, like the door to the apartment, the house, entrance like a gate, a triumph arch, like a break through to something better, higher, transcendental.
My interests circulate within the frames of questioning the gallery system as a specific segment of a much wider system of professional art dealing, and specially visual and conceptual research of the gallery space as a white cube; an exploration not so much under the thesis of influence of the context in which the works are exhibited but as peculiarity itself, but as the space who’s verve today has a certain status. I am dealing with the gallery space as a mental space.