Deceptive Eye

The Institute of Continuation presents: Deceptive Eye

Johann Arens
Alex Reynolds

Deceptive Eye started as a conversation about how meaning is pieced together from images and environments in the surrounding world. Starting from Alex Reynolds work We Can Hear You Drink (2011) a group of young artists met up to speak about differences between the viewer and the witness, about direction, manipulation and montage.

The conversation took place at the museum flat Kämpingebacken 13 in Tensta, a site which has been reconstructed into the original design of the Artursson family who lived there in 1960's.

In its altered form, Deceptive Eye – the exhibition presents itself as an independent continuation of the conversation. Including works by German artist Johann Arens and Spanish/English artist Alex Reynolds, the emphasis on the physical site is still apparent but the installation is now mainly communicated through camera lenses and video channels. The state of the distributed image through modern technologies is evident, but the works in Deceptive Eye also bring forward the human body, mind-games and medical conditions, pointing back to our own abilities to comprehend, interpret and confuse.

Johann Arens uses the moving image to disrupt the seen and the understood, pointing to the image's dependence of surrounding elements such as constructed narratives; the spatial and technical installation as well as the viewer's own ability to remain attentive.

The works present a complex position of the photograph, an existence that easily can be shared, cropped, compressed and at the same time as it often is given the status of representation. Effect Rating (2011), a double-channel video, shows documentary footage of volunteers undergoing a brain scan whilst being under the influence of the hallucinatory substance psilocybin. Slowly the images are broken up as they are abstracted by installations mimicking the institutional laboratory setting. Bringing the physical setting out of the image, the work Ort Ort (2011) displays a model constructed out of a specific situation and environment. Hardly visible in the exhibition space, the source of the model may be found by visiting its online presence.

Hung at 172 cm Alex Reynolds' snapshot of a mole in the back of her head began the ongoing collection of images shown in When Smoke Becomes Fire, My Love Reveals Things Unknown Were Mine All Along (2010 -).

Almost as scientific proves of the unknown, these images document what cannot be seen with the bare eye, places that are too far away, too dark or simply closed off. Invented in the act of presentation the photographs point to the uninterrupted dependency of the camera to depict reality.

Turning to the mind's creation of relations and meaning Nine Seconds of Black (2009) departs from memories made into visual reality in the short moment of blindness during an eye operation.

The Institute of Continuation creates and continues conversations in the field of art together with Stockholm-based artists. Sometimes these conversations result in exhibitions, performances, workshops or events where international guests are invited to challenge our thoughts and ideas. During our six-month existence we function as a self-organized school, a research-based project room and as an experimental site for and by the artist.

Please join us IRL or follow our conversations on: www.theinstituteofcontinuation.org

Katrin Ingelstedt Curator