The Samstag Alumni

The 2002 Anne & Gordon Samstag
International Visual Arts Scholarships

Renato Colangelo | Sarah Elson | Mathieu Gallois | Annie Hogan | Timothy Horn | Astra Howard | Darren Siwes | Daniel von Sturmer

Daniel von Sturmer is concerned with investigating the experience of public space, focussing specifically on the sequestered, privileged space of the art gallery. General Review of Gain and Loss, a collaborative exhibition with Leslie Eastman and Andy Thomson, transformed the gallery into a labyrinth of corridors, using screens and windows, camera obscura and video projections to turn the space outside-in, dismantling the various framing devices which separate a picture from its context, a gallery from its surroundings, art from 'everyday life'. Plane, where von Sturmer excised a section of the gallery wall and replaced it with plate glass, continued this style of intervention, for as it 'opened up' the gallery spaces to one another, multiplying lines of visibility and points of contact, the solid plane of glass barred access, evoking the 'look but don't touch' conditioning of the well-behaved gallery visitor.

The other element of von Sturmer's practice is video, a medium seemingly incompatible with these spatial interventions. Science Fiction features a loop of five 'tricks', simple gags mostly done by running the video backwards - a blob of plasticine 'miraculously' regains its cuboid shape; a blob of blu-tac leaps up to attach itself to a fingertip; the surface of the water in a glass tilts weirdly sideways as in a force field. Projected onto a wall-mounted perspex screen, the video's studio backgrounds blend into the gallery surroundings so that these little stunts become dematerialised presences within the gallery itself, 'works of art' in the obvious, slightly silly sense. Their tricksiness, then, wittily calls attention to the privileges of the exhibition space, where, temporarily, the rules (in this case, of physics) do not apply.

Russell Smith
from his Samstag catalogue essay;
Making The Makers

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• The Samstag Alumni

Science Fiction 2001
DVD projection, loop 2.20 minutes
acrylic screen 60x45 cm
© the artist

Plane (detail) 2000
wall excision, wood
glass pane 360x120 cm
© the artist