Reign of Silence
Lukas Marxt
June 1 - 30, 2018
Dark Room
Torrance Art Museum is pleased to welcome two video works by Austrian artist, Lukas Marxt. These two works, Reign of Silence and Two Skies, will be installed in the Dark Room at TAM throughout the month of June 2018. Marxt invites you to explore video landscapes dealing with different temporalities and peripheries.
Reign of Silence
7 min / DE / 2013
Reign of Silence records a human intervention in nature. Lukas Marxt employs as aesthetic material and artistic medium an untouched, barren landscape that’s strangely surreal, where humans aren´t really expected. In this reduced setting he plays with the fascinating aspect of an autonomous nature, made visible by his aesthetic action; with the constantly changing relationship between humankind, environment and water; with processes of temporality and perception.
The conceptual reference to Land Art is obvious, and also to Robert Smithson´s iconic Spiral Jetty, which can be read ironically. But Reign of Silence represents more than a kind of filmic memory of a passing moment. The film not only documents something, it actually lays the filmic image over this landscape like a transparency, as a second artistic medium, indicating something beyond it and expanding the perspective. Marxt looks for a perceptual dimension that demands not only a reaction to nature as a spectacle, but also to the circumstances in which it was reproduced, and finds for this purpose a concentrated and playful form. Until it all ends as it began: with a view of serene, undisturbed water and in silence, with a form that finds its way back to itself, and which has transitioned to something different.
Two Skies
4 min / DE / 2013
Two Skies disallows any and all shift in perspective and shows two horizons of a gas field, filmed from a drilling platform in the Tampen area in the southern part of the Norwegian Sea at two different times of day: dawn and dusk. A surreal landscape that departs from dimension of terrestrial reality extends across the whole width of the space. The muffled monumental sound, the penetrating blue and the flashing white waves transport the viewer to a place that cannot exist in this way. Two ocean surfaces from ground and sky, strictly separated by a dynamic horizon. Perhaps this horizon is an entrance to other surrounding, to landscapes that lead away from this scenario. Lukas Marxt employs the elements of water and wind here as tools in the production of his picture. Wind power moves the deep blue ocean surfaces that seemingly can become a dangerous vortex within a matter of seconds.
Lukas Marxt (*1983, Austria), lives and works in Cologne and Graz. He studied Environmental Sciences for Geography, in 2004 he switched to audio visual studies at the Art University in Linz. From 2007 to 2008 he attended the Faculdade de Belas Artes de Lisboa at the Institut Arte Multimédia. In 2009 Marxt carried on with post graduate studies at the Art University in Cologne and attended post graduate studies at the HGB Leipzig.
Exhibition supported by:
