Expanding notion of space and boundaries
The German artist Felix Kiessling wishes through his artworks to expand your notion of spatiality and their boundaries.
As you entered the exhibition space in the Alexander Levy Gallery where Felix Kiessling recently exhibited you met an enormous aluminium star measuring approximately 12x12x12meters. The fragile frame of the star penetrated both in a literal sense and conceptual sense the room’s physical boundaries by piercing through the gallery’s walls, windows and ceiling. Kiessling thereby deconstructed the conventional gallery space while also referring to the way human beings construct their surrounding spaces to be able to exist, understand and communicate the world they embody in regards to spatiality, direction and orientation.
The installations in the Alexander Levy gallery room was connected to each other through the earthbound and very tangible hanging doors in the back of the exhibition room to the very abstract notion of depicting the solar system in two dimensions on one of the gallery walls. And the same goes for the crooked aluminium star that physically penetrated the gallery walls and thereby expanding the space to the photographs of the vectors situated in various landscapes and surroundings. The consistency and connection lies in the motion starting in the earthbound, literal notion of space to the abstraction of spatiality.
The star’s orientation pointed in crooked angles around in the gallery space and encouraged the participant to curiously look around, on one of the walls you would see a 1:1 two dimensional drawing, depicting the solar system in which Kiessling had added an object between the earth and moon. On the other wall there were 12 photographs in which you saw a 1meter long aluminium stick similar to the one used to build the star, arranged in different angles in various landscapes. The orientation of the aluminium stick in the photographs is either horizontal or vertical regardless of how the landscapes and surroundings were orientated. The interaction between the orientation of foreground vs. background and the orientation of the vectors teased the participant’s eye and made it impossible to pick out a specific focal point in the pictures.
This gave you as a participant an ability to continuously change the single picture’s visual expression and also the series as a whole either as a series of four or maybe even a series of twelve. The patterns stood out differently for each possible approach. Focussing on one single picture the interaction between background and foreground would be what sparked your curiosity. When you considered the complete series of four pictures beside each other, it was most likely to be the single photograph where one vector is placed horizontally when the other three are placed vertically that triggered your interest. The photographs of the vectors in it’s entirety or regarded as a single photography focused on directionality and the construction of how we as humans with our embodied relation to our surroundings and the world must construct and create these directions to survive and to navigate our bodies through our surroundings. Felix Kiessling is showing his participants through this artistic approach that how you percept and structure your reality is a construction and it reminds the participant of the fact, that we are indeed able to change this way of perceiving as long as we are aware of the structures.
Both the photographs and the star draw attention to the bodily constraints that a being will have to deal with in order to navigate the world. The boundaries and limitations of the experienced world and especially breaking through them and thereby revealing and uncovering their structure seems to interest Felix Kiessling. Through these artworks one could argue that Kiessling is on a Merleau-Ponty-ian quest to re-sensitize his participant. What Kiessling hopes to evoke in his participants is a heightened sense of presence and observation toward the surroundings and especially to each other.
Read the interview with Felix Kiessling here
Check out Kiessling’s website here
See what’s going on at the Alexander Levy Gallery here
