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From the surface into the depths. Four large tableaus in basic colours blue, red, yellow and green. Made out of wood and mounted on each of them like a
relief are four symbols of the animated world – a circle, a house, a mountain with two summits and a tree. Quite decoratively - and endowed with the poetic
charme of a children‘s book that explains the simple truths of the world – the Hamburg based artist Marie Anne Jakob has combined in her installation for
signifiers of extistential constants. They present themselves isolated, aslant and turned upside down. Only the sun and the moon which govern vegetation
and the rhythm of human existence are unaltered no matter what the perspective. But the house is upside-down, the mountain is falling down summits first,
much as if it is hanging into space by the southern antipode of the world.
The house is place of emotion and culture. The mountain signifies creation. The tree may stand for the species of ever changing living beings. Man, as a
pictoral rendering, is absent, but is represented by the beholder. Consequently, without the beholder and his/her „shifting“ the piece would only
accomplish half of its intention and would not function fully. Whenever a beholder moves around in front of the pieces they trigger a motion detector which
in turn switches on a mechanism that makes one of the symbols on the tableau rotate. „Shift“ – the title of the show – very literally means switching,
shifting, re-thinking, change of position.
The installation may come of as harmless at first but carries in it a mild critique of civilisation. These scenes seem to present a world in which all is
well, but the world is not quite like that – it is different than the simple order of the shapes may suggest. The motion detector is part of a premeditated
process that usually finds application in monitored and protected environments.
Despite technology connecting and weaving together all possible worlds, near perfect bureaucratic planning and state and municipal controlling structures,
families, individuals and nature more and more give the impression of becoming fundamentally derailed. For the constant permutation of life‘s coordinates
the painter Marie Anne Jakob has found pictoral criteria: Aside from the mounted relief symbols they are themselves shadowed in paint directly on the canvas
– delineating traces of prehistoric times. It is in their cave and rock drawings that our ancestors recorded the living beings, rituals and actions which
were of paramount importance to them.
Right next to the shadows the symbols occur yet again as faintly hatched outlines, creating a sense of the dynamic, of floating: Only the incorporeal
outline of a floating state remains. It is this very motion that creates an historic dimension. It is up to the beholder to let pass before him the
changes in the social order. Ever increasing motion and mobility – they are the signs, the signified and the catalysts of this installation.
One half of the gallery space is Marie Anne Jakob’s, the other half shows works of Jörg Huber. They are connceted by means of a sound collage filling out
the space with sounds of footsteps – a disturbing collection of motion made audible.
Gyde Cold
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