#
Date
Title
Source
Description
Tags
W3880
19.05.2011
fly-though - Kasper Kovitz
WWW
  • ‘fly-though’ animation of this project at: http://www.re-title.com/artists/Kasper-Kovitz3.asp ‘witchbunker’, a project begun in 2001, is a walk-in sculpture. It consists of a one-room traditional American pioneer log cabin encased in a concret ...

    ‘fly-though’ animation of this project at: http://www.re-title.com/artists/Kasper-Kovitz3.asp

    ‘witchbunker’, a project begun in 2001, is a walk-in sculpture. It consists of a one-room traditional American pioneer log cabin encased in a concrete bunker shell two stories beneath the ground, accessible by a long narrow staircase.

    It is next to an interstate, open to all, indicated as a point of interest on a roadmap. The site is inconspicuous, a door in a smallish earth mound. One enters, descends, the light disappears and the temperature drops. At the bottom of the stair the log cabin is tightly fitted in the concrete shell. Earlier working titles include Frontier Monument and El Corazon Oscuro.

    The project to date consists of sketches, a model, a thumb flip-book and two computer animations simulating a ‘fly-through’. Acquiring land and raising funds to make the sculpture is a sidecar project: sketches for roadside billboards to GIVE to the Frontier Monument, and a donation website concept.

    I’ve been drawn to places where boundaries – literally and figuratively – are constantly being tested and stretched, and my life work has come to reflect a kind of artistic “manifest destiny. The story of the New World is a way for me to comment on my own progress, as an artist and a transplant in America. I am mostly concerned with my ambivalence about action in the face of wilderness. It seems to me that exploring the wilderness, and reporting on what you’ve seen, is a moral conundrum. It’s like digging up a chest full of treasure – once you pull it out into the open it becomes endangered. This idea is the underpinning of my epic visual poem-in-progress I call “The Lost Explorer.”

    The Lost Explorer is conceived of as a “super installation”. Each piece I’ve made in the last ten-something years ( witchbunker is an early project in this effort) can be seen as part of the installation and related to each other. I’ve been exploring in a poetic-alchemic process that is mainly concerned with quantities and relationships of materials to my subjects. I choose subject matters for the associations they provoke with materials that have real or perceived properties. Format and scale vary widely, I want to remain uncomfortable to a certain degree in my approach, and I am also interested in how method can further elicit associations from and with the subject.

    My “oscillating” approach to my subject therefore – ever-changing viewpoints and materials - fits with my ideas about identity and representation. To me the familiar appearance of things does not represent the inner reality those things possess. To reveal the wholeness of a subject, the “general appearance” needs to be broken down, the parts of the whole recombined until the thing itself is re-placed by mood which is no longer bound to a singular phenomena but rather, as an oscillation of components, becomes an experience, a feeling, of the subject.

    ‘fly-though’ animation of this project at: http://www.re-title.com/artists/Kasper-Kovitz3.asp ‘witchbunker’, a project begun in 2001, is a walk-in sculpture. It consists of a one-room traditional American pioneer log cabin encased in a concret ...

    ‘fly-though’ animation of this project at: http://www.re-title.com/artists/Kasper-Kovitz3.asp

    ‘witchbunker’, a project begun in 2001, is a walk-in sculpture. It consists of a one-room traditional American pioneer log cabin encased in a concrete bunker shell two stories beneath the ground, accessible by a long narrow staircase.

    It is next to an interstate, open to all, indicated as a point of interest on a roadmap. The site is inconspicuous, a door in a smallish earth mound. One enters, descends, the light disappears and the temperature drops. At the bottom of the stair the log cabin is tightly fitted in the concrete shell. Earlier working titles include Frontier Monument and El Corazon Oscuro.

    The project to date consists of sketches, a model, a thumb flip-book and two computer animations simulating a ‘fly-through’. Acquiring land and raising funds to make the sculpture is a sidecar project: sketches for roadside billboards to GIVE to the Frontier Monument, and a donation website concept.

    I’ve been drawn to places where boundaries – literally and figuratively – are constantly being tested and stretched, and my life work has come to reflect a kind of artistic “manifest destiny. The story of the New World is a way for me to comment on my own progress, as an artist and a transplant in America. I am mostly concerned with my ambivalence about action in the face of wilderness. It seems to me that exploring the wilderness, and reporting on what you’ve seen, is a moral conundrum. It’s like digging up a chest full of treasure – once you pull it out into the open it becomes endangered. This idea is the underpinning of my epic visual poem-in-progress I call “The Lost Explorer.”

    The Lost Explorer is conceived of as a “super installation”. Each piece I’ve made in the last ten-something years ( witchbunker is an early project in this effort) can be seen as part of the installation and related to each other. I’ve been exploring in a poetic-alchemic process that is mainly concerned with quantities and relationships of materials to my subjects. I choose subject matters for the associations they provoke with materials that have real or perceived properties. Format and scale vary widely, I want to remain uncomfortable to a certain degree in my approach, and I am also interested in how method can further elicit associations from and with the subject.

    My “oscillating” approach to my subject therefore – ever-changing viewpoints and materials - fits with my ideas about identity and representation. To me the familiar appearance of things does not represent the inner reality those things possess. To reveal the wholeness of a subject, the “general appearance” needs to be broken down, the parts of the whole recombined until the thing itself is re-placed by mood which is no longer bound to a singular phenomena but rather, as an oscillation of components, becomes an experience, a feeling, of the subject.