SANCTUARY FOR REVERSE ENGINEERING 2013

THE MESMERIZER OF ABSENCE

5ft.H x 45ft.W x 30ft.L

Laser jet printed vinyl stretched onto a steel dish, powder coated steel tower/arms, rubber guides, motorized gear system, floodlights

Description:

SANCTUARY FOR REVERSE ENGINEERING  (R.E.S.) This monumental project is a collaboration between Gary Hill and Allan Packer, for the Mas d'Azil Cave Heritage Site. The installation of the two artists is articulated through two works specifically designed for the site. It has been imagined in relation to the history of the place and its capacity to integrate an installation that goes beyond the usual chronological boundaries as an indeterminate space-time, where the relations between nature and culture, present and past, technology and human life exist. 

THE MESMERIZER OF ABSENCE is located in the monumental gallery of the Mas d'Azil cave, in the extension of the departmental road that dramatically crosses the cavity in the axis of the river. "The Mesmenzer of Absence" is the border between two worlds: the underworld and the light world, two rich spaces of antagonism between life and death, the present and the past. Motorized, the spiral slowly catches the eyes towards this symbolic threshold between the light of the outside and the darkness of the cave. Its outer part, in motion, is suspended above the bed of the river, and extends towards the depths of the cave according to a conical and curved profile. This form responds to the very structure of the cave and seems to accelerate it like a grafted machine on the rock. An activator of stories and hypotheses that completes the transformation of the Mas d'Azil site into an imaginary ideal for fiction, the work designates the passage of time through its rotation, and through its visual effects the possibility of its oblivion

Installation History:

Cave of Mas d'Azil,
France,
May 25 - November 11, 2013 

Festival international d’art de Toulouse et du Mas-d’Azil.
June 23rd, 2013

Catalogue:

http://www.caisseepargne-art-contemporain.fr/images/imagesFCK/file/partenaires/fiat_2013/guidevisiteurfiat.pdf

Bibliography:

Gary Hill et Allan Packer tranfigurent la grotte
LADEPECHE
May 22nd, 2013