Thomas Demand, Pacific Sun, 2012. Production still © Thomas Demand/SODRAC (2012) Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York/Sprüth Magers, Berlin and London/Esther Schipper, Berlin
Thomas Demand
Animations
19 January – 12 May 2013
at DHC/ART, Montréal
Curator: John Zeppetelli
A philosophical commentator on the authenticity of the “real†and the slippages of memory, Thomas Demand is a well-known German photographer who began as a sculptor, but is now widely acclaimed for photographic and moving image works.
Demand’s work interlaces photography, architecture and sculpture. His method usually begins with an image culled from the media, which is meticulously re-fabricated, by hand, into a life-size, three-dimensional paper and cardboard sculpture, to ultimately end up as a photograph. The resulting images are both very recognizable and strangely out of reach. Crucial to the context are photography’s long-debated truth claims, and the photograph’s indexical quality.
The artist’s intriguing photos and films, always devoid of people, lure the viewer into a reality that is not what it appears to be. He makes images in the image of an image – therefore, triply removed from reality. The large format photos are the end result of a circuitous movement beginning with media imagery (photojournalism or surveillance video footage) depicting a known scene of political intrigue or other malfeasance – through to a painstakingly rendered sculpture to re-emerge as the same, yet-not-quite-the-same, photograph. Significantly, the sets or sculptures are destroyed after the photograph is taken. [read the full text here]
DHC/ART
451 & 465, St-Jean Street
Montréal, Quebec
H2Y 2R5
Canada
dhc-art.org
Opening hours
Wednesday – Friday: 12h00 – 19h00
Saturday & Sunday: 11h00 – 18h00
Thomas Demand, Rain/Regen, 2008. Still © Thomas Demand/SODRAC (2012) Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York/Sprüth Magers, Berlin and London/Esther Schipper, Berlin
Thomas Demand, Rolltreppe/Escalator, 2000. Still © Thomas Demand/SODRAC (2012) Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York/Sprüth Magers, Berlin and London/Esther Schipper, Berlin