About
Wilkinson Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Jacob Dahl Jürgensen. For Jürgensen's second exhibition at Wilkinson, the artist has created a theatrical installation, which consists of individual works including video, screen-printing and sculpture. The show plays with exhibition conventions, language and narrative, and employs mathematical concepts and metaphors to examine subject/object relations in the face of changing technological paradigms. Staged as if halted in the process of being installed or de-installed, the artworks casually lean, hang and sit on the floor of the gallery space. The gallery lighting is off and instead the space is lit by a handful of freestanding lamps with coloured light bulbs.
Figure of Eight, Reconfigured is an architectural structure designed specifically for the gallery space. Consisting of large black frames, some open and some covered with fabric, the structure plays with transparency and accessibility. As Its title suggests the design reflects the shape of a figure of eight (the symbolic representation of infinity). However, the construction is not fully assembled, ambiguously and paradoxically frozen in the process of either being put up or taken down.
Light Play Red Green Blue, is a projected video work. The title is a detournement of Laszlo Moholy Nagy's well-known film Light Play Black White Grey from 1930. In Jürgensen's video the kinetic sculpture has been replaced by a laptop computer as the object under examination. In a digitally animated sequence the 'camera' zooms in on the computer's screen, (which is showing a film about a potato crisp factory), to the point that the image becomes only red, green and blue pixels (hence the title of the work). The video continually moves back and forth in between these two fields of reality and simulation.
Topos, Topics, Tipp-Ex, is a video work in which two actors, a man and a woman, read out from a found script. The set is obviously a mock-up of a 'white cube' gallery space. At some point in the script confusion arises as to whose lines are whose, and the two subjects become unmoored. Sticking with the script, the two actors's characters are swapped. Everything is repeated, line for line and shot for shot, but with the roles reversed to create a narrative Moebius strip.
Semiosis? Is a series of colourful screen-prints of antique vessels. The images, which come from the artist's research archive, and have all been found on the Internet, display heavy compression artefacts. Printed on transparent Perspex, their shadows are visible through the images themselves. But this transparency blurs the images and obscures their interpretation, as their shadows create the effect of a double exposure. As the title of the works suggests the images hover in between picture and sign. But the objects in the images, the containers, are here paradoxically reduced to pure surface, form without content.
