CIRCUMSPECTION

Claudia Hausfeld’s artistic practice deals with photography and its connection to reality, deconstructing and reconfiguring objects and places into new perspectives. The central element of her work takes a start at photography’s claim to authenticity and follows it through various bends and tricks towards abstraction. The exhibition, Circumspection, is about just that, prudently journeying around things and objects and places with exercised meaning and intent. In her artistic method, Hausfeld uses her photography and practice to gain a full comprehension of an object, and whilst also questioning whether such a comprehension is even possible. In her images we take this journey with Hausfeld, traveling through and around the conception of an object, through circumspect and care we find its true meaning. We discover the object through coming back to and around itself. Ultimately, Hausfeld wants to free the image from the burden of recognizability, to keep the eye wandering in search for meaning and to make that incongruency visible. Hausfeld examines the two dimensionality of the image through layering and use of flat space, conflating directions and orientation. She uses different tools to achieve confusion: digital manipulation, folding and crumbling of the image plane, creating three dimensional image-objects, direct cutting of images and collage, rephotographing, using macro lenses etc. Hausfeld’s most recent work takes her back to the darkroom, to the beginning of photography. The analogue process is deeply rooted in actual scientific technology, at the same time it is escorted by alchemy and magic. The direct relation between surfaces, light, time and chemicals offers many ways to create the incongruency that can free photography from its obligation to depict and lift it into the realm of abstraction.

Daría Sól Andrews

Studio Sól, 2018