Scenes from a Marriage  [Exhibition at Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt]   (2011)

Scenes from a Marriage  [Exhibition at Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt]   (2011)

 

Baffle
Wood, and mirror hanging in window of Flat
2, Hinterhaus, Hafenstrasse 23, 60327
Frankfurt am Main, Germany
254.5 w x 151cm

Baffle is to confuse, but it also is a term for a device which regulates or filters a flow of light, often casting particular shapes of light and shadow for use in film or theatre. The baffle installed at Neue Alte Brucke includes shapes taken from the space outside the gallery in the building’s courtyard – a tree branch and a neighbour’s window – rendering them as negative space with the capacity to cast light into the gallery interior. But Baffle also includes the reflections of strip lights from within the gallery generating a peculiar logic for combining and displacing interior and exterior details, of presence and absence.
The work is also dependant on the complicity of a neighbour living opposite the gallery’s rear window who was asked to hang a small circular mirror in his window.  This offers the possibility of it catching the sun and reflecting that back through the baffle and into the gallery, projecting the forms this screen delineates.  Baffle’s operation is based on this involvement with another, and it includes a negative of the mirror as its equal and opposite.

Flyposted posters on the ground floor windows of Hafenstrasse 23, 60327 Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
35mm slide of Ecuador, 1968, by unknown tourist.
Yugoslavia, Fodor’s Modern Guides, published 1966
Each 58.8cm x 79.8cm