Picture Window #5 - Boxes, by Daniela Friebel

About

A floating drawing of boxes is rendered out of black drinking straws, which are seized in translucent threads (the same way insects get captured on a spider web).

Taking inspiration from the history of painting and the perspective machines and tools that artists invented to transfer as veraciously as possible a three dimensional scenery into a sheet of paper or canvas, such as the idea of understanding painting as an open window, (“finestra aperta” of Leon Battista Alberti,) or the technique of constructing an image (Albrecht Dürer), Friebel firstly lines up a simple grid. On the thread pitch the gallery space is projected, whereas the straws, likewise in a digital vector sketch, “draw” boxes, piled up or spread in the room. The midmost point of the window’s width that meets the line of eye level is the exact standpoint from where the drawing of the boxes is perceived undistorted.

Photography was often referred to as a cross-section of space and time. Daniela Friebel’s picture seen from the window screen is a cross-section through space and time literally.

Why boxes? Berlin is, maybe significantly more than other metropols, a city in permanent motion and transformation that reminds rather the hot plasma in the early universe. In this transition, artists and off-spaces are particularly disposed to instability, unpredictability, dislocation eventually suspension.