22.04.–11.07.2010
Exhibition at CaféCult #44

Karin Peyker

Opening: April 21, 2010, 7 p.m.

As part of the exhibition series at CaféCult #44
Karin Peyker presented her work “Domestic Nature,” 2010.

The room installation by Karin Peyker in the Kunstverein café was composed of a wall-filling photomural integrating paper birds and natural set pieces, a framed landscape photograph, and songbirds in the background.

All elements are found objects. The wide screen wallpaper image of a mountain lake surrounded by woods does not come from a real photograph. It was generated on a computer using design tools. The main motif of the mountain lake fills the center. In the foreground the trees are arranged in a way that suggests to the viewer that he has finally reached his goal after a long hike, and the secluded lake is revealed to him in front of thrilling mountain scenery. At this point the entire image has unveiled itself as a series of
found objects. Bird decoys extend the found object principle into the room. Diagonally across from the mural, an actual, framed forest landscape photo mirrors the living room character of the installation.

The artist confronts the viewer with different image formats, production techniques, and presentation forms of a single type of landscape. None of these is an artistically “valuable” unique piece; everything is based on mass production for a mass consumer group. The small picture is the image of an illusion. It offers the viewer the opportunity to briefly unwind and had part of a piece of “paradise.” The wide screen image goes one step further and reduces the distance to the viewer by bringing him or her directly into the image.

Claudia Czimek operated in a similar manner when she, as Madame Bricolage, uses a landscape photomural in the House of Stories (Linz, 2009) as a starting point to bring the landscape into the room using crafty recycling. During opening hours Czimek knitted, crocheted, glued, and shaped imaginary animals and flowers and transformed the space available to her into a “horror vacui” until the end of the exhibition period.

By making use of prefabricated, cheap, mass-produced goods, Peyker confronts us with issue of the context of the images. Is there still a difference between image and art in the age of industrial manufacturing? Are images just fed from the collective “imagined” and thereby intrinsically available before an artist produces them? Is the need to create images still a reaction to the old “horror vacui”?

Creating images is based on experiences in reality, in a sense they are removed from reality, references of reality. For a long time they were produced by artists and in turn fed into the collective imagination. Instead of producing images herself, Peyker uses “artificially” fabricated images, images that simulate the real and sell it to us as the “truth.” She compiles this material in an installation and creates a new “image” through it. She deals with the concept of an image, which traditionally refers to a single piece à la panel. But at least since Baudrillard we have known that “Images were never faithful representations of true ‘reality,’ because, exactly the opposite, they invented the changeable idea of what real is.”

Gabi Wagner

Karin Peyker, born in 1979 in Klagenfurt, lives and works in Salzburg. From 1999-2004 Karin Peyker studied sculpture under Professor Ruedi Arnold at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. From 2004-2006 she completed postgraduate studies in photography at the Academy of Visual Arts (HGB) in Leipzig. In 2006 Karin Peyker was an assistant in the photography course at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg. Most recently she participated in the exhibitions “Right Here, Right Now,” Fotohof Salzburg, “For a Short Time Unseen,” Kunstraum St. Virgil, Salzburg, and “Raumeditionen,” Artwalk Salzburg.