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About
Nothing and Everything simultaneously
The works of
artist-duo Lisa Jeannin and Rolf Schuurmans are fascinating, though not easily
situated. Some explanation might be in order, especially considering their current
solo exhibition at the Base-Alpha Gallery in Antwerp.
Alexandra
CROUWERS
Somewhere, deep in the Swedish midland the
Swedish/Dutch artist couple Lisa Jeannin and Rolf Schuurmans are working on the
construction of a parallel universe which contains its own inhabitants,
landscapes and spaces, and above all its own logic. Their studio isn’t confined
to the wooden walls of their base – a former small church building – but
stretches itself into the surrounding pine tree forests, the bright, clear lakes,
the moss overgrown rocks and strange local edifices. Also, they don’t limit
themselves to one dominant medium but they use stop-motion animations,
sculptures, video, 8mm film, music, sounds, drawings, murals, neon-lights and
hand-colored prints of film stills. This arsenal of media is combined in rather
alienating installations.
AFFECT
Though the artists largely use recognizable,
figurative elements, the works are close to incomprehensible within the laws of
ratio. They respond to ‘affect’, a term originated from psychology that can be
described as a ‘primary, physical reaction which proceeds consciousness’ and is
impossible to be translated into language (*). In each work Jeannin and
Schuurmans provide us with a huge amount of information, manifested as images
and sound, and trust your subconscious processes to connect all this.
This ‘affect’ takes effect due to the many references to
a universal imagery of myths and legends from eras when people from all over
this planet had a necessity to convey their mental worlds into image, sound,
ritual and narrative.
Jeannin and Schuurmans explore and exploit the
embedded tendency of our mind to give meaning to what we see. In cases when what
we see is difficult to be explained with rational logic, we fall back on a more
intuitive, symbolic interpretation. This is both the foundation for religion as
well as for interpreting art. Traces of illusionism and animism, next to
notions of shaman storytellers can be reconstructed from the duo’s works. Yet
you don’t need to consider yourself a spiritual shaman to appreciate the work.
On the contrary: you can be a nihilistic atheist just like the writer of this
piece.
The nucleus of the installations often consists of
multiple, inter-related and interactive projections. The convincing amount of
details in the often space-filling installations guides the viewer to effortly access
their universe. Sometimes the viewer is a physical participant: in ‘Enter theWild’ (2009) the visitor has to walk through a door that is simultaneously part
of a projection screen on which a filmed door opens. Their latest installation
‘Hokus Pokus’ at the Base-Alpha Gallery in Antwerp, reveals itself only after
the viewer has moved through a lightning-strike-like crack in a wall. The darkened
space that follows is lit by black-lights which reflect a forest of birch
trees. The animation in the back space connects an animated skeleton walking
through blossoming flowers with, amongst other things a hybrid between a tree
and a human, a fluorescent three-dimensional pentagram and a cool magician who
turns a normal sized wrapped Swedish cheese into the proportions of a huge
building. The pentagram – in the animation a scale model – is in this space present
as a life-sized sculpture.
At first glance the stop-motion animations - in some
respects related to the work of another Swedish artist, Nathalie Djurberg - combined
with the nostalgic use of 8mm film makes an almost childlike impression. In
‘Crossing’ (2006) a chain-smoking, drumming spider presents a film to an
audience of characters in the setting of a forest. In its turn this 8mm film
shows a herd of zombies – played by friends and acquaintances – being tamed by
three martial arts specialists. In ‘GGG&G’ (2007), next to some sort of
cult of small trolls and a camera-eyed gorilla, children in green bodypaint are
presented. Together the children give shape to a cheerful interpretation of the
Hindu goddess Shiva. This character wears a necklace of singing skulls.
LIMITLESS
The description of this chain of events seems
lighthearted but within the works of the artist duo much larger themes are
addressed than the short-term tendencies the contemporary art world often prefers
to deal with. Jeannin and Schuurmans wish to cross the boundaries of space and
time, of scale and of thought; of imagination itself.
It’s of no use attempting to explain what their
self-constructed myths are in fact about. It is sufficient to remark that
they’re about Nothing and Everything at the same time. This might sound
non-committal but the couple doesn’t have the luxury to work like that when the
production of an animation is accompanied with the building of large scale
models of landscapes and sets or filming growing flowers frame by frame for
three weeks.
In fact their works and methods represent mainly a limitlessness
between everything and nothing: their environment is integrated in films,
outside becomes inside and vice versa, their friends and family members are
actors and heavy, metaphysical narration becomes comical. Every kind of media
that is at their disposal is explored – I didn’t even get around to mention
their performances with the keyboard playing turtle Vilhelm -, objects
reincarnate into characters or the other way around and even between an object
and a character the difference is diffuse: a tree becomes an actor, a spider
exists simultaneously as a character and as an object on variable scales.
This duplication and re-duplication also recurred in
‘Beyond the Sea’, their retrospective at the Malmö Konstmuseum in autumn 2010. The
exhibition assembled a large part of their installations and sculptures. The
word ‘sea’ from the title not only referred to large surfaces of water but also
to ‘see’ or ‘seen’. This presentation stressed the coherence between all the
works and made clear that every work can be considered as a chapter from a
non-linear, or rather a Multi-linear, narrative that takes places on several
levels.
The relevance of their work derives mainly from the
necessity of actually making it. This is transferred to the visitor who, though
he might not be able to make any sense of what he’s presented with, for the
duration of his stay in an installation irrevocably becomes part of Jeannin and
Schuurmans ever expanding universe.
(*
cf. Nat Muller, ‘Feeling it in your guts’, Metropolis M, nº6, 2009)
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