The Cat in the Box in the Forest of Falling Trees 

Daniel Hosego, The Cat in the Box in the Forest of Falling Trees, no format.

A new mixed media installation by Daniel Hosego combining wood, clamps, wires and spotlights.

Daniel Hosego’s latest installation challenges the established relationship between the viewer, artwork and artist by inserting the viewer in the centre of a constantly changing dynamic of interrelating positions and asking them to define where the boundaries lie.

"The title is a reference to both Erwin Schrodinger's ʻCat in a Box' thought experiment and Bishop George Berkley's metaphysical musings on the possibility of unperceived existence. Schrodinger's experiment hypothesized that a cat locked in a steal box with a radioactive substance can exist indefinitely as both dead and alive as long as no one opens the box and determines its fate. Berkley's ʻA Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge' (1710) marks the genesis of the idea that would eventually become articulated into the famous paradox ʻIf a tree falls in the forest but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" - DH

The focus of the installation is 5 arborescent structures (2m x 1.8m x 1.8m) mounted on stacking palettes. All the structures have multiple wooden ‘branches’ sprouting from their upper portions with a spotlight affixed to the front of each. While appearing to be a disorderly mass, the branches are arranged into groups that point the spotlights outwards in several different directions. The bulbs of each spotlight are masked with electrical tape which is the cut back into with a scalpel to shape the light emitted. This ‘shaped’ light then passes through a colour filter and a focusing lens attached to the front of the spotlight to give it both colour and sharpness. All the different shapes of light from all the individual spotlights pointing in a certain direction are focused at an area 1.5m in front of the structure, where they combine like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to create a large scale simulacrum of an iconic painting. The paintings created have been selected purposely because of their status and the immediacy with which most people will be able to relate to them. Each structure only creates the work of one particular artist (Warhol, Lichtenstein, Matisse, Mondrian, Picasso) and assumes their form through minute variations in their construction mimicking the idiosyncrasy of the individual.
http://www.noformat.co.uk/