Lydia Wilhelm

February 16 – March 30 2014

Human beings systematically generate knowledge and (re-)construct reality. An example of this is the constant structuring of data, perception and its visualisation in maps, diagrams or other schematic representations. Lydia Wilhelm (*1975, lives and works in Winterthur) uses various visual languages that refer to science, traditional handcraft and painting. She is interested in alterations provoked by digital and analogue reproduction, the particularities of which are thus revealed; both calculation and coincidence shape her artistic process.
Four bodies of work, representative for Lydia Wilhelm’s current artistic investigation, are centre stage in the show at Kunsthalle. In the series of prints called Falschlicht, pictures of mountain crystals are manipulated during digital scanning, before they serve as new ‘originals’ in a traditional reproduction method called heliogravure. Mountain crystals are also the main subject in a series of photographic intarsia; a triangular grid is here used to convert two pictures into one. The pictures of landscapes in Iceland, folded into a regular pattern, also play with the relation between two- and three-dimensionality and challenge the limits of our visual perception. In another, large scale folded piece this turns into straightforward perturbation, when the folded landscape is based on pictures of the space where they are now exhibited. The main focus of Lydia Wilhelm’s work, to make visible different modes of representation and to evoke the structures of visual perception, is also key in her newest work: red and green laser beams illuminate the interior of mountain crystals and, depending on the various aberration, cast various drawings onto the wall.

Joëlle Menzi