IAN WIECZOREK - Visual Artist

IUXTA

Installation/intervention, created as part of LAF2015 Larroque Arts Festival in S. France
Location: woodland clearing next to a minor thoroughfare for local traffic and tourists
Conceived and devised by Ian Wieczorek, realised by Ian Wieczorek and Lara Sophie Benjamin

Description:

Located in a corner clearing/campsite visible from a road trail now used primarily by locals and hikers, a dead tree branch about 3m long appears to float horizontally about 1.5m above the ground. Suspended for all intents and purposes invisibly, this intervention presents as an unheralded and unadvertised physical/visual contradiction that might as easily be missed as noticed. Its existence requires discovery.
Coordinates: 44°00'13.6"N 1°41'31.8"E (44.003788, 1.692159)

The work acknowledges 'Das Unheimliche' (the Uncanny), a phenomenon described by Friedrich Schelling in 1835 and subsequently elaborated upon by Sigmund Freud in his essay of the same name: the idea of an object being strangely familiar rather than completely unfathomable, "straddling the line between reality and unreality".

As well as offering a quiet visual incongruity that seems to challenge the physics of the everyday, located in the forested heart of the French Midi-Pyrénées, it also acknowledges the character of the local geography and a human presence that has existed in the region since Palaeolithic times. In the same way as Anselm Kiefer, Josef Beuys and Caspar David Friedrich have referenced the forest as a spiritual keystone of German identity, this folkloric intervention proposes that the forest here might similarly be viewed through the prism of pre-Christian customs, superstitions and earlier belief systems.

The title derives from the word 'juxtaposition':
juxtaposition (n.) - from Latin iuxta "beside, near" + French position (n.)

(References:
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, Philosophie der Mythologie, 1835
Freud, Sigmund, Das Unheimliche, 1919
Patten, Dr. Janice E., The Literary Link, http://theliterarylink.com/uncanny.html )

Link to Video of work in situ
(external link to Vimeo)

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