Jill Baroff, Stefana McClure

The Shape of Time

May 20th - August 30th 2006

Entitled "The Shape of Time," the exhibition included works on paper, film, and sculptures by the artists Jill Baroff (born 1954, USA) and Stefana McClure (born 1959, Ireland).  Both artists asked themselves:  does time move forward continuously, or does it whirl back and forth between the future and the past?  In Stefana McClure's hour-long film on paper, translated dialogue in the form of film subtitles, intertitles, or closed captions is systematically removed from a rich monochromatic beam.  Each subtitle takes away some transfer material in the form of language and thus adds information by subtracting matter.  Jill Baroff's tide-drawings are based on web information on marine tides, and their patterns reflect the tides in various ports around the world.  The drawings illustrate spatial patterns:  images of time and geography that are not normally visible.

The resulting collaborative work combines these two procedures:  "Three Minute Fuse" is a tide-like editing of the famous three-minute continuous camera movement in the beginning of Orson Welle's film "Touch of Evil."  The gripping story moves back and forth in time, repeating the tides of the Pacific Ocean on the coast of Los Angeles, where the film was shot. Those three minutes are exposed to a thirty-day tidal cycle and culminate in the power of the new moon in the middle of the film, setting the story in an almost convulsive mess.  The work in the Kunstverein's exhibition uses the same self-structuring methodology, in which the visual form is created and determined by the process of work.  Information in the form of data or sound provides the raw material, a series of repeating events or gestures that together create the image.

The work of both artists is marked by a common interest in conceptual work and the processing of information and materials.  Although the work at first seems individual, and that each artist's piece moves in a different direction (one tends towards language and text, while the other uses a more concrete approach), the relationship between both is visible when viewed side-by-side. 

An exhibition catalog with an essay by Markus Weckesser has been published in Modo Verlag Freiburg. 

The exhibition is sponsored by the state of Lower Saxony and by the city of Neuenhaus.