During her stay at the AIR – ARTIST IN RESIDENCE Niederösterreich program in fall 2018, an intense exchange developed between Australian artist Helen Grogan (born 1979) and Galerie Stadtpark Krems around themes of perception, space/sculpture, and reality, specifically on the kinesthetic and performative dimension of spatial perception. These discussions will now be culminating in a solo exhibition with Grogan in December featuring two spatial, installation-based works.
Helen Grogan’s aesthetic practice can be described formally and medially as a field of interactions and interferences between sculptural, photographic, and cinematic mediums. The process of observation itself becomes a material. Her work examines directly and situationally the given conditions of the exhibition location. Grogan questions each location she works with in physical, ontological, but also often works specifically with aspects of spatial shifts, rearrangements, and reconfigurations in order to focus attention on the temporal and procedural dimension of the spatial, but also socio-aesthetic, and ultimately also political terms. Beyond purely formal and phenomenological conditions, Grogan’s aesthetic examination involves a subtle critique of the institutional conditions of the exhibition format.
Grogan views the exhibition location as fundamentally performative. The viewer’s process of perception is not simply perception; rather, perception, i.e. the act of perceiving, is what first brings the space into being. The artist to call into question supposed certainties regarding spatial conditions. Her works seek to raise a kind of awareness of one’s own physical being, of the productive potential within the process of perception, and of the perception of an incessantly, albeit often indiscernibly changing present and reality.
David Komary, Galerie Stadtpark
Photo Credit
Helen Grogan, POEM (with insistence on plurality), 2015-2018 (Installation detail from Gertrude Glasshouse iteration, 2015) © Helen Grogan
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