Setting Sun

Billboard paper, 450(h) x 990(w) cm, 2013, Istrazivacka stanica za savremenu umetnosti Perpetuum Mobile, Belgrade, Serbia

Photography by Senja Vild

The title of this poster work is Setting Sun.   When one looks at the poster in Perpetuum Mobile, it is both a semi-abstract and symbolic image.  If you isolate the elements from which the image is composed, you arrive at an intuitive association with nature and more specifically experiencing the setting sun.  In the poster, there is the colour spectrum which is perceived in the sky as the sun sinks into the horizon, in the undulating glass columns are reflected and refracted these colours as they would reflect off the dancing surface of water. All of this movement is produced by the static scene in the image which is too multifarious to be apperceived as a totality.  

                My idea was to make images of virtual spaces which are then printed as posters and added as extensions to physical space.  This practice can be referenced to 70s pop culture, specifically to the picture wall papers of living rooms which typically depicted verdant forest scenes in which one usually saw a gentle waterfall or autumnal scenes.  In one of the scenes in the film Scarface, there is such a poster which depicts the sun setting on a beach paradise, palm trees silhouetted against the reddening sky.  Today, we regard this as kitsch or at best ironic.  There is some ironic playfulness in our choice of wallpaper image which presents an idealised scene of interplaying geometric elements, a type of eidetic or ideal correlate to the forest scenes of the seventies wallpapers.  The ideas for this work rest on certain philosophical ways of thinking about the relationship of science and nature.

                This is a poster installation resulting from a collaboration between myself and the Serbian architect Ana Lazarević.  The idea came to me in 2007 when I was working on a video project in BIGZ called The Typical Reject.  I approached some architects to create a background scene of an illusory space. 

                In 2012, I approached Ana Lazarević to help create photo-wallpaper for one of the walls in my current studio,  thinking of it an experiment to see how easy it is to work and live with this poster. 

                The result inspired us and others and we were invited to make a new work for Perpetuum Mobile in Belgrade, an artspace on the banks of the Danube.  The floor and ceiling characteristics of Perpetuum Mobile were implemented into the virtual space of the image.  When making the virtual model, we thought about the action of sunlight in the gallery space, how the viewer moves around the space and other site specific factors. 

December 2013, Mark Brogan