10.12.2009–24.01.2010
Exhibition in the Cabinet

Michaela Frühwirth
Latitude

Opening: December 9, 2009, 7 p.m.

The exhibition Latitude consisted of two drawings – Obstruction, 2006, pencil on translucent paper, 101x301 cm and Sermilik Station, 2009, pencil on paper, 300x367 cm – and a slight architectural alteration to the space. This setting exposeed observation per-se, in other words the drawings, the space and the act of viewing interacted in a way that relations between observer and observed became tangible.

The entrance portal to the Kabinett was extended diagonally in such a way that it aligned with an exterior window. This intervention formed a corridor, which lead towards the exterior ”view“. The corridor aimed to enact observation, preparing the setting for viewing. Once entered – the visitor’s gaze was guided along a sequence of familiar visual themes: the converging lines of the corridor, the wall punctured by a window, the grid of the windowpanes and the particular framing of the setting beyond. Just before the end of this corridor, the hegemony of the procession was violated when the space opened sideways in either direction – leading towards two concentrated yet distinct distillations of vision. The constructed hallway bisected the space forming two unequal chambers, each housing a drawing: Obstruction in the space with another view to the exterior and Sermilik Station installed in the more hermetic side of the space.

The drawings are derived from actual locations. When drawn, the image begins to operate as a screen or a membrane on which the view of a surrounding condenses and congeals. Here the picture plane acts to extend the delay within which sensations begin to take hold, prolonging the flicker between a moment before-ness and a meaning-reflex. These drawings, wedged between “abstraction” and “place,” engaged the viewer in a patient perceptual movement back and forth within the presented space by in-forming the threshold within which our surroundings always unfold as “making sense.” The drawing format operates on a scale that relates to the viewer’s body. It is no longer a “picture” to behold, but rather a space or place within which both the image and the observer emerge intertwined from within the act of viewing itself.

Michaela Frühwirth, born 1972 in Vienna, lives and works in Amsterdam