CONEY ISLAND
Yves Scherer Curated by Samuel Leuenberger
6 Apr – 21 May 2014

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Opening: 5 April 2014, 5 – 8.30 pm

Yves Scherer's practice revolves around the various forms that communication can be channeled through. By means of texts, designs, cyber and internet tactics, the way technology at large influences our everyday life, the artist explores not merely the meaning of the message itself but moreover how this message can be captured and thus displayed in alternate settings. What container carries which image or which image in turn gets projected or inscribed onto what surface, Scherer is vividly changing the interface of all his surfaces, their (sur)face becomes content and thus the display-strategy for each new environment. Film works, sound-installations, objects which are haphazardly set against theatrical settings shift from “virtual” interiors, the insides of PCs, their housings to a real encounter. Large perspex boxes that normally serve to protect an artwork become the protagonist in Scherer's work, the perspex as transparent housing for nothing but volume, or rather the idea of the potential. Sometimes these boxes are scratched, written or sprayed on, they can serve as screen for a recorded Skype conversation that is projected against them or one the other hand hold an artwork inside them, such a fake piece of grass, old carpets, et al, heralded (or poked fun at?), as another form of new painting. These large boxes of perspex can hang, stand or lean against the wall and become sort of mirrors for the audience; they leave enough space for interpretation and simultaneously they allude to the desire that Scherer insists of capturing, one of transcendental omnipresence if one permits to mix philosophical ideas with the mundane and virtual “all-knowing” web content. This strategy is repeated in other works by him such an empty computer tower, with its side open, but stuffed with a winter's down-jacket. The computer tower can also become a source of light, hanging from the ceiling, a “tattoo” like form is stenciled out through the metal siding, the light emits from there. A nice parable to the knowledge and importance of this construct which processes and channels all the information we come across in the web, our source of information today.

For this exhibition, Yves Scherer has taken the former garages outside at SALTS, closed them almost entirely and created a self-sufficient story-cycle within this now window-less cubicles. The two rooms are an attempt to bring the virtual, the digital information he collected from the net, the hypothetical and the obsessive elements from the world of glamour, stars, communication and longing into the physical space, a sort of three dimensional rendition of a two dimensional sourcing process, a personal adaption of what it could feel like if we were to find ourselves inside a computer filled with various thoughts, feelings and physically felt confrontations. Its a long shot from the vision of the hollywood film Tron, the 1982 film where the protagonist gets caught inside a video-game and ends up having to fight for his life but in fact, if he dies in the game he dies in real life. Here we find ourselves in less violent and more surreal setting, two rooms, one dominated by white day like setting, the other by a dark, more night setting tell the story of a young woman who is trying to find herself. A set of perspex boxes, inscribed with a poem, a small Manga Style drawing, a portrait, is taped to the wall, the recorded sound of a ventilator hissing, emits from a loudspeaker sitting on the floor – the other room, adjacent emits an even louder sound, the room is insulated, hardly lit - a woman is standing in the space, with her back turned the entrance, the viewer. The hyperreal encounter makes these living quarters bizarrely a sad place, a gritty room, a dream like, isolated space which seems to be missing some information, which is lacking some details, a rendering not complete. Welcome to Coney Island.

Yves Scherer - List of works

Outside
Alienware, 2014
Bricks, plaster
230 x 260 cm

Room I
More than distance between us, 2014
Perspex, fake flowers, marker pen, smear
Diptych 210 x 140 x 5 cm (each)

Tatami, 2014
Inkjet print on canvas
4 x 170 x 85 cm

Premises, 2014
Pencil, inkjet print on paper, tape
29.7 x 21 cm

Room II
Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate
at Heathrow Airport, 2014
Steamed beech, necklace
165 x 48 x 35 cm

Coolermaster Silencio III, 2014
Industrial fan, foam
Dimensions variable

Photography: courtesy Gunnar Meier