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Ulrike Rathjen
BUILDING CASTLES
IN SPAIN |
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REDWASH, 2001
video projection, duration 18min., (dimensions variable, approx. 2x3m)
Turning, turning, turning.
What first seems to be a still shot of clothes begins to move. Water
starts dripping down, the garments take it up and change their colour.
They slowly turn and stop again and with each turn and stop a new
composition of clothes and with it a new composition of colours and
contents appears. A strong meditative feeling is created by the
continuous motion. While the wash is resting subtle events take place
captured in apparently unmotivated 'film-stills', like the slight
movement of a garment or the dripping of water.
Resting and turning, Redwash slowly progresses into an exciting final
spin cycle. An enlightening red vibrates, expands, contracts, fastens
and slows down. A warm field of red colour embraces and soaks the
viewer creating a new, almost physical space for contemplation.
Projected directly onto a white wall, Redwash functions like a
painting. It opens a perspective into another world. The contemplative
atmosphere of the climactic final spin is shortly interrupted by some
splashes of foam and washing powder. It appears as if Jackson Pollock
had done a dripping in one of Rothko's paintings. Then the tension
resolves and reveals again: the wash. The turning gets slower and
slower until the washed garments come to rest.
Redwash is a painting in the contemporary media of video. The title
uses the double meaning of wash as "the act of cleaning clothes" and
"a thin layer of colour painted on a surface".
It is the ordinary process of washing the artist's red clothes,
recorded on tape and projected onto the wall. It plays without sound
focusing on the visual and the tension of the extra-ordinary. It is
edited without any interventions or digital manipulation. The duration
of the recording is defined by the duration of the short wash cycle.
It is however cut after the climatic spin cycle. It lasts 18 minutes.
As a washing cycle Redwash circles around garments and identity,
around gender, the body and the ephemeral.
Katja Then
Link zur Arbeit
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