Saskia Olde Wolbers: Between Space and Place
Saskia Olde Wolbers: Between Space and Place
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Saskia Olde Wolbers Deadline 2007 Video still Courtesy Maureen Paley Gallery London |
The Art Gallery of York University comes through on its promise to be “out there” with a series of surreal video works by London-based Dutch artist Saskia Olde Wolbers that take us into fantastical but fragmentary worlds. Although inspired by “real” reported events and empirical anecdotes, Wolbers’s short narrative videos are set in otherworldly miniature landscapes meticulously crafted in everyday materials. Wire, beads, string and unidentifiable liquids are combined and recontextualized to create affective and depopulated environments. The resulting imagery is a strange mix of the recognizable and the bizarre, recalling 1950s science fiction film sets and low-fi special effects. In Deadline, the artist’s most recent work, extravagant and disorienting landscapes provide the backdrop for a trip from Gambia to Benin in west Africa. Accompanied by disembodied voice-over narratives, Wolbers’s evocative landscapes seem to hint towards a complete narrative while simultaneously threatening to collapse under their own fragile construction. The viewer—adrift in the AGYU’s darkened screening rooms without a protagonist to identify with—takes on the role of narrator and becomes immersed in Wolbers’s deceptively simple constructions, floating somewhere on the rapidly blurring boundary between evocative space and real place. (4700 Keele St, Toronto ON)
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Saskia Olde Wolbers Deadline 2007 Video still Courtesy Maureen Paley Gallery London |
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