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Visual arts

GEERT GOIRIS

GEERT GOIRIS

Information on the activity

May 2, 2014 to June 28, 2014

VOX will present, in collaboration with Netwerk / center for contemporary art, the first major exhibition in Canada of works by Flemish artist Geert Goiris.

Geert Goiris is a photographer interested in the notion of “first encounters.” The images in the series Resonance depict anomalous appearances in landscapes, portraits and interiors. These analogue photographs are made without digital manipulation or post-production, and investigate concepts such as “traumatic realism,” wilderness as a metaphor, and cabin fever: limit-experiences in isolated places. In the large-format slide projection Whiteout, the iconography of exploration is thematized, alongside the imagination of unknown territories. The actual experience of being present, and the subsequent reflection on the status of the immersed observer, are pivotal in this piece. Its genesis was the artist’s reading of a first-hand account of two polar explorers who were stuck in a whiteout for several days while travelling across the Greenland ice sheet. The two men described the meteorological phenomenon almost as a mythical experience: the landscape disappearing into a void, the dissolving of all matter into light. The account triggered Goiris’s fascination for natural optical effects that challenge or defy observation. In Whiteout, he concentrates on the registration of this elusive phenomenon—barely visible and nearly resisting reproduction.

Currently, Goiris is directing his attention toward pictorial representations of The End. For his work-in-progress Adieu, he is compiling a set of photographs thematizing the tension of the final gaze. The series is not intended as a collection of apocalyptic doom scenarios, but instead focusses on the disintegration and transition of materiality and perception.