Daniel von Sturmer
Set Piece

For his first UK solo exhi­bi­tion in the UK, at Site Gallery, Daniel von Sturmer pre­sent­ed an ambi­tious instal­la­tion of new video works with­in a tem­po­rary archi­tec­ture cre­at­ed espe­cial­ly for the exhi­bi­tion. The work fol­lowed strate­gies used when the artist rep­re­sent­ed Aus­tralia in the Venice Bien­nale 2007.

Link­ing the two gallery spaces, the work medi­ates the viewer’s expe­ri­ence of the gallery con­text and the ​‘work’ with­in it. A num­ber of small video pro­jec­tion screens are inte­grat­ed into the fab­ric of the gallery and the new spa­tial inter­ven­tion. Using these dis­crete ele­ments the work forms a syn­the­sis of expe­ri­ence in which the view­er is able to be an active, par­tic­i­pa­to­ry agent and arbiter of mean­ing. The new video works play with the spa­tial dynam­ics of pic­to­r­i­al space using famil­iar every­day mate­ri­als and objects in new and unex­pect­ed ways. The depict­ed spaces ref­er­ence and echo aspects of the struc­ture and the gallery space itself, cre­at­ing vignettes which inter­face the real and the pic­to­r­i­al. The videos are intend­ed to be play­ful, humor­ous and thought pro­vok­ing, ref­er­enc­ing them­selves as visu­al con­ceits and point­ing to the con­struc­tion of the visu­al lan­guage we rely on to describe and define the world.