Mirjam Kuitenbrouwer - Wanderings of case study windows




Mirjam Kuitenbrouwer, installation view Wohnmaschine, 2004


 

November 12, 2004 - January 15, 2005

 

In her exhibition Wanderings of Case Study Windows the Dutch artist Mirjam Kuitenbrouwer (born 1967) presents a new series of photographic works. The eight large-format photographs show landscape views of the nature conservation and development area Gelderse Poort – between Arnheim, Nimwegen, and Emmerich – made with a camera obscura the artist built herself.

 

Taking up the idea of the architecture of case study houses around Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s, Kuitenbrouwer constructed an ideal window of brass, a window frame that can be set up in front of her lens-less panoramic camera. The photographs thus give the impression of being a view onto the landscape through the window facade of a modernist house.

For several days the artist wandered through the river landscape with her camera equipment, seeking appropriate places for her camera house. At first, nature was her studio; at the moment the picture was taken, however, the camera brought nature into its interior, and the camera itself became the studio.

 

In her works Kuitenbrouwer establishes a close connection to architecture and explores in photographs, drawings, collages, and sculptures the boundaries between the interior and exterior spaces she imagines. In doing so she plays with the viewers’ mechanisms of perception and creates places that cannot be accessed physically but only in the imagination of the individual.

 

“Right now everything in my work is permeated with prospects. The window, too, as a setting for a prospect, fascinates me. It forms the frame through which the image of the view out and view in are perceived. It immediately suggests a parallel between the viewer as person and the viewer as camera. Both can record and process images. Everything comes in through a constricted opening and collects on the back wall of the apparatus or on the back of the viewer’s head. Le Corbusier describes the window as a lens, the so-called ‘fenêtre en longueur’ [ribbon window], with which viewers take a photo of the view every time they look out the window. It is an image that is nearly impossible to capture: the constantly changing prospect. A gigantic universe.” Mirjam Kuitenbrouwer, June 2004