Ulrike Feser

Ulrike Feser "Tourist"


Opening Friday, June 29, 2001, 7 - 9 p.m.
Exhibition dates June 30 - August 11, 2001
Opening hours Wed-Fri 1 - 7 p.m. Sat 1 - 6 p.m.



With the exhibition "Tourist", Gallery Kamm presents Ulrike Feser, an artist now represented by the gallery. Ulrike Feser employs photography to examine integral parts of mass culture and their associated cultural projections.
"repeat to fade", Ulrike Feser's new book, which was published by Revolver Press this year, discusses for example Hawaii, defined and marketed as a place of idealized nature, which acts as an area on to which cultural projections occur.
The color photographs exhibited in the exhibition "Tourist" interpret Los Angeles on the basis of the artists perception as a foreigner. The photographs are consciously avoiding the well known images and clichés of the city presented to the world through cinematic means. Through depiction of Freeway landscapes and concrete facades the photographs ask how and whether people can live here.

The artist depicts Los Angeles as a place lacking a single identity, a city of autonomous traffic inferstructures, where the notions of outside and inside don´t exist. Participating in the internal movement of the city, the photographs are taken from inside a car. Respectively the images are leading to other automobiles, landscapes butting up to the roadside, or concrete beams supporting bridges.

"The view seen from a moving car represents the pinnacle of the urban experience: seeing is separated from the act of moving. Major cities offer an abundance of enticing surfaces which when viewed in motion, are presented and withdraw simultaneously. They offer areas without pause, one is denied the privilege of being able to enjoy and develop personal perspectives. They offer situations where expanses of space and time are lacking and every decisive chance to grasp the view is hindered.
However, one does not have to stay in a passive position. Ulrike Feser´s photographs attempt to reconstruct a situation from a lasting perspective. In the moment the picture was shot, the possibilities are introduced. Where otherwise the journey collapses from speed upon itself, where a series of impressions accumulate and are placed in a formless conglomerate, and where memories are represented as an exhausted condition of perception, the artist insists: this here, this absolutely concrete cross-section from a flow of impressions fascinates me and therefore my interest in Los Angeles is obvious." Robert Pitterle