Hymn for the house

Year: 2020

Material: Reflective Mylar, 3min sound file.

Dimensions: Variable

Writing by Arthur Buerms, director Nomadic Art Gallery. 

For our exhibition "Nostalgia", Woodman came with the idea of a visual and conceptual "tabula rasa". In other words: an erasure of all mental content and clues related to what had happened in the gallery (which also happens to be our home) by installing a visual and sensory mindfuck, totally based on the experience and perception of the moment itself. This led him to cover the entire gallery space with sheets of Mylar, which is a reflective material with a near metallic sheen, and to pair it with a self-orchestrated ambient soundscape called “Hymn for the house”.

By popping up at different locations in Nelson, we encouraged passers-by to become alert of the public dimension of art reception and the variations these can bring to the perception of oneself and our mental baggage in relation to an artwork.

Besides the embedded visual idiosyncrasy, and by operating in an “atemporal" vacuum as an outpost of nostalgia, Woodman's audio-visual installation was deprived of any rules triggering individual or collective participation. The reflective surfaces, mirroring both the viewer and its environment whilst also grasping images of the display context and the galleries’ surroundings, meant viewers could watch themselves seeing. In an instant, the art gallery transformed into a social laboratory in which the binary relationship between the beholder and the invisible art object is challenged, thereby heightening viewers’ awareness of the socio-emotional and spatial context of the aesthetic experience.

At the time, we had no idea of the future impact of the installation’s conception and construction but, retrospectively, it is something we look back to as a pivotal moment in our gallery’s existence and our lives. Woodman was able to weapon nostalgia and thereby to shift our proximity to the lived experience. This private/public and interpersonal form of art spectatorship allowed us to appreciate our beautiful and sad memories for what they are, to reflect on mental recreations (or exaggerations) of past experiences, and to take aesthetic pleasure in our present experience of a moment without fretting over the fact that we will never be able to relive that moment in time

Arthur Buerms, Curator/Director Nomadic Art Gallery