NASTURTIUM is installation art, my first artwork from a category of new media techniques, segment of my art work for a long time. There are two elements of the artwork: computer graphics and mirrors which compose an ambiance or installation art object.
Nasturtium
See how I and some other artists explained this artwork (translation by Aleksandra Petrović)…
This is an artistic game in a space, which actively includes the spectators. There is more then one reason for this kind of art work: for one thing, the gallery with its position of columns could be used as an element of the composition, then again its low ceiling, and more, the gallery exterior, the park in the Fortress, was also embodied in the conceiving of the exhibition. In such a manner, the gallery columns are covered with computer graphics with vegetarian motives.
An important part of this whole is positioning the mirrors which are arranged around the columns in the unoccupied gallery space, except for the walls, so the columns get their reflections in them. To walk trough the room is to experience the work completely. It represents a part of a wide constellation and will serve as an outline for future work.
NASTURTIUM was exhibited in 1999 Contemporary Art Gallery Pavilion of the Fortress, Nis, Serbia
See what writer and journalist Ivan Vasović has wrote in his short storry inspired by this art installation…
N° 3
After participating in numerous YU film and art exchanges, and long epic voyages, forest hedgehog has returned to its previous affairs…
To which precious affairs, you grumble again, my bothersome reader…Well, to swirl in the shriveled leaves of its worm habitat, a hedgehogs natural environment, its small den…
Here are the words by artist, writer and art critic Mileta Prodanović about the Nasturtium exhibition…
FOREST TO OUR TIMES MEASURE
A forest is a sum of the alike and, in the same time, unlike particles. There are in each of those particles innumerable series of alike and again somehow unlike elements. Leaves, for one. The forest is, on the other hand, a strong archetypal picture – in tales, the plots are conceived, or they occur in dense and slightly darkened forests. The ecologists will ensure us, though, that the forest is the basic element of our existence – they will say that they are the lungs of the planet and that their decay and thinning out is a serious hazard to life on Earth. Since long, the artists painted opaque and some mysterious atmosphere of the groves – to mention Giorgione’s ‘Storm’ and many other… The ambient structure of Sandra Smiljkovic, of course, is a work of different times, based on different experience, using altogether altered potentials and starting points, the experience which Walter Benjamin called ‘the Epoch of Technical Reproduction’. The basic lever of her work is a contrast. Inclusion of the ‘Forest’ in a slightly neglected gallery ambience and its disposition to embody this construction, in fact, is a contrast of closed-unenclosed. The theme and its realization, again catch one other contrast, natural-unnatural. There within lies one more, and that is the contras of alike – unlike. And with the mirror constellations, another polarity emerges, image – reflection. All these scopes create one delicately ironic, humorous surrounding. Being formally different, it is still in agreement with the foregoing research work of Aleksandra Smiljkovic, created in her traditional painted work. In the same time, this one opens spacious possibilities for further steps out to new entirety and work, produced with break-through means of high technology.
I hope you can imagine walking trough my artificial forest and enjoy all sensations you can expect to find in such type of installation art work, or ambience, like my NASTURTIUM.
