Peripheral Vision 06.09 - 08.09.2018
In his solo exhibition Peripheral Vision at Tique Art Space, Ralph Collier demonstrates what is visible is not necessarily what is real. How many times has it happened, that you wander the streets and suddenly, in passing, from the corner of your eye, you notice something or someone well known to you? In a blink, you think you recognize them, know them. But here you tend to cast a fictitious shadow on their fugitive life. Just as you are wired to make these first assumptions about these images occurring on the edges of your gaze, Peripheral Vision also appeals to the assumptions of the exhibition format itself. An exhibition is usually thought of as a space where objects are exhibited and where you spend an undefined time beholding them. So what would happen to the script if this is turned around? What happens if the exhibition is conceived as duration? If time is given to the space? For Peripheral Vision, editing the duration, the rhythm, the qualities of sequences is key. It even permeates its graphic design, taking the form of a timetable of the main work.
The exhibition opening was the centerpiece, lasting two hours and thirty minutes - not coincidentally the average time of a museum visit. In this time, you, the visitor, were guided by subtle events: appearances of famous people. They come, they stay, for the same amount of time as the time their professional activities in the media and entertainment take, and they leave. These apparitions are almost dramaturgical strategies which focus you, force you to look again at what and who is present. The others visitors were doing it too. In the time they shared, they became an ensemble, performing an unrehearsed choreography. And as such, the exhibition became a series of moments, a temporalized, experiential space. This does mean, however, that without the visitor, there would be no exhibition. No material artifacts are exhibited, no objects mediate what is happening, nothing else can invoke the mise-en-scène.
With contributions by Richard Clay, Axel Daeseleire, Sofie Engelen, Wim Helsen, Herwig Ilegems, Welmer Keesmaat, Tom Van Bauwel, Vincent Egon Verschueren, Eline Verstegen
Text by Eline Verstegen
Pictures by Welmer Keesmaat
Tique Art Space
Korte Vlierstraat 5
2000 Antwerp, BE