Opening: Monday, 20 January 2020 at 7 p.m.
Introduction: Michaela Obermair
Duration: 21 January – 22 February 2020
Artist talk: Thursday, 13 February at 7 p.m.
Finissage with Video-screening:
Thursday, 20 February at 7 p.m.
sponsored by: BKA Österreich; MA7-Kultur; Cyberlab
Since 2010 the FOTOGALERIE WIEN has put on an annual solo exhibition showcasing the work of a young, upcoming artist. This series of exhibitions, SOLO, functions as a platform and springboard for artists who are at the beginning of their career but who already have an extensive body of work that we want to present to a wider public. The aim is to achieve a sustainable level of public presence for the chosen artist and includes helping to organize cooperations and touring shows. For SOLO XI we have invited the artist Peter Hoiß who was born in 1977; he lives and works in Vienna and Brunnenthal.
Peter Hoiß’s work is cross-media and encompasses photography, installation and video. In Panopticon, he shows an insight into his artistic cabinet of curiosities of things that for him belong to the way of seeing. In doing so he breaks with conventional ways and enhances our attention to concentrate on the connections of the medium of photography with other means of artistic expression. Gelenkte Sicht is the title of his work complex in which two-dimensional images are invested with an additional illusion by large scale periscopes. The content is thereby transposed into form as if the two would mutually supplement and enter into a dialogue with each other.
In Panopticon one can have physical experiences and realign the gaze. Peter Hoiß builds a kind of SLR camera and a giant gazer that make it possible to literally experience images, whereas a touchscreen is providing a tactile reference to the photochemical process. The pictures show forest-, volcano- and seascapes which are forced to share our attention with sports grounds, observatories and oil drilling platforms. Human changes to the environment are filtered out of the photographs. Human interventions in nature which, in our everyday lives, are often no longer noticed, are revealed. Coloured filters turn the black and white photographs into flip images that allow the gaze to wander in different directions.
Peter Hoiß is not interested in providing answers but in formulating questions. And he also wants to show everything that optics and photography can be. By isolating individual elements of his art work such as the red light, the camera lens and the watering of analogue photography, he brings them into focus, constantly re-adjusting the possibilities inherent in photographic representation. In his large scale Panopticon optical phenomena encourage questions to surface. Each of us must find the answers for ourselves. (Michaela Obermair)