Carsten Höller

Carsten Höller is a very intriguing German artist who focuses on creating an experimental setting for his exhibit goers to put themselves into.  His most famous works are slides constructed as a means of transportation throughout the floors of the exhibit.  Höller believes that slides make almost everyone happy and yet allow for that loss of control, of putting yourself in an experiment.  One of his slides series, Left/Right ’10 consisted of two mirrored slides, one going left and one going right, where the viewer had to decide.  It was about the different feeling of the slide.

Exhibit goers often have to sign a waiver that does indicate there might be some serious consequences to his work.  Once series, Light Wall, is a wall full of lights going on an off at a frequency of 7.8 hertz, that will more likely than not cause problems for an epileptic.

Another reoccurring theme is various of depictions fly-agaric mushrooms.  Known for producing hallucinations, these mushrooms are depicted in many different ways throughout different series.

Höller really wants the viewer to have the sense of losing control and discovering something about themselves due to his artwork, which in reality is a relational concept which might scare the viewer but also will produce interesting results should the viewer go through with the experiment.

Nick Olson: A Vision for the Future

Picture http://nickolsonphotography.com/evolution.html#

 

Nick Olson practices wet plate collodion, an involved photography process, which is very hands on and requires time, deliberate action, as well as knowledge of the effects of the current environment on the process of development.  As he puts it, he “went down to the basics”, which seemed an interesting way to go in order to really understand his method of photography.  He chose to shun modern processes of life in order to really get the hang of being deliberate.  He used the word deliberate to describe his series on portraiture, which was about deliberate people who were conscious about their existence and why they were living in the way they did.  If one were to look at this from a non-art perspective, it wouldn’t really make sense, especially with little knowledge about the wet plate process.  It seems through looking at his art and methods of creation, that he wants the world to go back to an earlier time, where we took consideration into the things we made and also put time into it.  His depiction of “Detritus in Detroit” as he described it, was a very entertaining piece for me and seems to have a place in the 21^st century because it shows modernity in not quite so modern of a sense.  Almost as if modernity couldn’t stand up to the face paced world it was in and needed to be taken back to a deliberate era.  It is almost a lesson waiting to be learned in some areas, one that I think people should take to heart, even if they don’t go as far as Nick did to get back to basics.  Maybe even something as simple as creating a home made birthday card would get people to realize that we shouldn’t give ourselves up to modernity.