katja loher :" where ever you may be"
curated by raul zamudio
april 28 - mai 13,2006

the:artist:network is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Swiss artist Katja Loher . The exhibition, titled Katja Loher: Wherever You May Be, consists of two site-specific video installations and photographs. Both installations and photographs revolve around the theme of longing and belonging and this nomadic impulse reflects the peripatetic nature of Loher's artistic trajectory: an aesthetic that is global in scope, but local in regards to where her art is made underscored with works in the exhibition conceived and created during her residency at the:artist:network. One installation utilizes the architecture and design of the:artist:network exhibition space and transforms it into a gesamkunstwerk typeˇ minimalist house, replete with door, mail box and windows.

The three windows are video works akin to a trilogy and serve as conceptual vistas into the artist‚s poetic exploration of New York and other locales that are not easily distinguished such as a forest and an underwater mise-en-scene. In one „video window” a woman descends, as if from another dimension, to earth in a bubble onto the gritty, industrial areas of Williamsburg and subsequently meanders through a visually rich tableau: a diner, a deserted street as well as other familiar and otherworldly backdrops that culminates in the video‚s coda with her bathing on a beach. Water, which features prominently in Loher‚s work, is the link to the other videos and is used metaphorically for its myriad associations: as cleanser and purifier, in its ability for circumvention, as catalyst intrinsic to life. The other video installation is formally and conceptually linked to this wok by way of the house‚s door and its peephole: as one looks into the aperture, the viewer‚s eye is captured live on camera and projected in an adjacent exhibition space onto a globe suspended from the ceiling that resembles an eye. The image on the eye is a confluence of recorded footage as well as the live feed. Video footage includes time-elapsed recordings of foliage growing from seedling to maturation, as well as a series of poems by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in which people are posed and positioned to create letters that from the words in the poems.