The virtual world is an essential theme in the exhibition Negative Meadow, which encourages the viewer to explore and sense the intertwinement of the virtual and the present reality. The accelerated evolution of contemporary technologies has affected our perception of time and space, because they are constantly changing our relationship with the immediate reality, and the representation of that reality, on virtual platforms.
The Danish visual artist, Theis Wendt, has worked with installation and sculpture in the specific architectural context of Kunsthal NORD. He uses todays digital flow of images in interaction with the analogue image, to create abstract, spatial installations and sculptures, through which he explores the image as space, surface, reflection and communication.
Negative Meadow is Theis Wendt’s most ambitious solo exhibition yet, he is inspired by Kunsthal NORD, situated in the building of a former coal power plant, as ‘the factory’, a representative symbol of how the work force, virtuality, climate change, nature and humans have been fused together in a virtual, omnipresent factory that never closes.
Theis Wendt has been on multiple research visits in order to study Kunsthal NORD and the surrounding city of Aalborg, to ensure a strong connection between the installation and the aesthetic and sensory experience of the building. The architecture of the old coal factory is raw and unpolished. However, through virtual interventions the actual space is expanded and twisted into an alternative reality. The installation hereby portrays a reinterpretation of inner and outer space, an intermediate space where time has momentarily stopped.
The exhibition Negative Meadow may seem dark and dystopian, but there is light in the synthetic darkness. Theis Wendt attempts to place the viewer in an encounter with the world, where seeds of doubt are sown of the world’s material reality.
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