Pro­jec­tions

Each of the works in Pro­jec­tions takes as its ref­er­ence a sheet of grad­u­at­ed pho­to­graph­ic back­ground paper typ­i­cal­ly used in prod­uct pho­tog­ra­phy and stu­dio por­trai­ture. Grad­u­at­ed paper is imprint­ed with a block of colour that slow­ly fades to white at its bot­tom edge, which also curls up slight­ly to form an infin­i­ty curve. Indeed, grad­u­at­ed paper is a small-scale ver­sion of the immer­sive cyclo­rama wall that tricks the eye into per­ceiv­ing bound­less space, where x and y axes bleed into one anoth­er, destab­lis­ing our depth of field. Hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly pho­tographed grad­u­at­ed paper; for this exhi­bi­tion, Daniel von Sturmer has cre­at­ed phys­i­cal repli­cas of these paper back­drops in alu­mini­um, hand-form­ing the curve around a cylin­dri­cal tube and coat­ing the pic­ture sur­face in mul­ti­ple lay­ers of acrylic enam­el paint.

Typ­i­cal­ly, in a pho­to­graph­ic shoot, an object or sub­ject is placed in front of grad­u­at­ed paper to make its details stand out against the blank mono­chrome back­ground. But in Pro­jec­tions, we are giv­en the back­ground — designed to dis­ap­pear into a sur­face­less obliv­ion or to be pho­to­shopped out lat­er — as the visu­al object in ques­tion. The eye is drawn into the absorp­tive mono­chrome before it is led down the image, where the pig­ment slow­ly fades to white. Here, the curv­ing pic­ture plane simul­ta­ne­ous­ly jumps out of pic­to­r­i­al space into three-dimen­sion­al­i­ty, its object­hood fur­ther under­scored by the shad­ow it casts against the gallery wall. The object is some­what inscrutable. It opti­cal­ly recedes even as it phys­i­cal­ly projects towards us. The artist has referred to this push-pull effect as ​‘with­hold­ing’; they fig­ure their knowa­bil­i­ty through reces­sion, if not withdrawal.

By rep­re­sent­ing the bare sup­port struc­tures of a com­mer­cial pho­to­graph­ic stu­dio with­in the gallery, von Sturmer’s Pro­jec­tions could be seen to ven­ture a form of insti­tu­tion­al cri­tique, but such approach­es are, for von Sturmer, always deter­mined with­in a set of rela­tions includ­ing philo­soph­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal con­cerns. Von Sturmer’s crit­i­cal approach is often addi­tive, not sole­ly sub­trac­tive. Truth is held out as an infi­nite­ly deferred, muta­ble enti­ty. It’s fig­ured as some­thing we might strive towards but nev­er ful­ly arrive at.

Helen Hugh­es, 2022