greenhouse
for
contemporary art
Werner Kernebeck | HOME
14.11.2014 - 08.03.2015
Performance / David Braithwaite
Finissage,Sunday, 08.03.2015, 5pm
Werner Kernebeck's installation 'HOME' floats like mist in the middle of the exhibition space, a regular glasshouse, but has more in common with the world of landscape architecture, than that of the hobby gardener. Werner Kernebeck, known for his many layered drawings and prints, whose structures often resemble city planning, or overlapping patterns, embraces the third dimension and presents us with a model landscape.
A tent-like canopy of semi-transparent reflective film, floats loftily and yet firmly grounded over a clearly defined rectangular field: a matrix-like space, like a 3-D chess board, into which natural and architectural elements are inserted. The metal skeleton of a spring mattress becomes the scaffolding for a model world of paper cuts, which proliferate over its many levels like plants over a trellis. The deep funnel-shaped spirals resembling craters or geysers, filled by Kernebeck with transparent plastic cups: an underground network of lakes connected by putative water veins, with glass dewdrops nestling amongst them.
Alone on the highest level of this landscape stands a house, also made of paper, resembling a scientific outpost in a Monopoly game far from Park Lane. A cartographers refuge perhaps? It could almost be for a character from "La Carte et le Territoire" by Michel Houellebecq. But Kernebeck's installation is not purely narrative, visitors to this house in a house in a house environment are treated to much more: a visual interplay of light and shadow, transparency and reflection. The floor of the glasshouse, mirrored with reflective film, reflects a single lightbulb hanging above to create an abstract light effect in the installation itself and in the outside area surrounding the glasshouse.
The whole landscape, a mirage in and around base camp, which attracts the attention of some unusual visitors...(text: Frederik Foert)
Werner Kernebeck | Presserelease
