Projective Space

Projective Space was a solo exhibition at the Galerie Sebastianskapelle, Ulm (2004)

The exhibition comprised three works exploring a central concern of my work, the notion of a ‘threshold’ or ‘screen’ between different levels of reality: the space of representation and the ‘real’ architectural space in which the viewer stands. Two types of spectatorship are juxtaposed, a direct physical response to ‘real’ objects within a gallery space, and the imaginative engagement implied by the ‘absent’ space of representation.

'Plenum #2' (2003) overlays a filmic reality onto the space of the gallery, a 15th Century chapel. A metal table frames the projection of an empty niche, into which a figure periodically emerges. The material presence of the slab-like table contrasts with the ephemeral projection, which fades and returns as the light changes.

'Milky Voids'(2003) is a b&w DVD film and photographic series documenting a site-specific installation at Botallack mine, Cornwall. Here the ‘screens’ are trays filled with milk, suspended within depressions in the floor of a ruined structure, which read as both representational voids, echoing the apertures of the wall openings, and tactile surfaces which ripple in the wind.

'San Lorenzo #1'(1998) was designed for Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library. Neither architectural model nor sculpture, Michael Archer notes of the San Lorenzo series that ‘palpably present, they intimate the absent architecture that occasioned them’.

'Milky Voids' is published as a bi-lingual publication by Galerie Sebastianskapelle, Ulm.

Ken Wilder

Current Research
My research is fine art based, but directly addresses architectural issues. I make gallery installations which often combine object and video projection. Currently I am undertaking a Ph.D. at Chelsea. This starts from a consideration of Richard Wollheim's theory of artistic expression, which identifies projection as central to 'correspondence' - a relation between an artefact and an emotion which the artwork invokes by virtue of how it looks. Yet the theory lacks specificity as to how 'projective properties' attach to artworks, as properties which reside in the works themselves rather than the projector.
I will address this question of attachment using artworks that employ 'space' as a conduit for the projection of emotions. My proposal argues that some key works of Renaissance art depart from Panofsky's categorisation of perspective as homogeneous space in order to create deliberately 'non-mathematical' passages within an otherwise 'rationally' constructed pictorial space. These spatial displacements channel the viewer's projection to an inviolable space within the work, a space subject to temporal anamorphosis.
Can such a concept of a projective space be extended beyond painting? And if so, can it operate with any kind of equivalence? These questions are tested against works that combine strategies of location and displacement by artists associated with 'conceptual art' (Smithson, Nauman and Asher), and new/existing examples of my own practice as an installation artist, a practice which employs the 'geometry' of projection in ways that give rise to displacements in the encounter between a spectator and an artwork

• http://www.chelsea.arts.ac.uk/testresear...