Just like Mike Lacey’s comic ‘X-Ray Specs’, the exhibition ‘The Wavering Stage’ played with its asymmetrical informational advantage over the environment. The view of the audience on the couch – on the motif of the invitation card – corresponds to the view through the X-ray glasses of Lacey’s young protagonist Ray.
With a medial transformation of the entire exhibition space and the accompanying mystification of the everyday object, the artist Alwin Lay also operated a mobilization of the visual habit. The objects he depicted often functioned as open projection surfaces and thus as infinitely deep containers of association at the same time. In this way, Lay’s precise statements constantly moved up and down between denotation and connotation in the perception of the observer.
Lorelinde Verhees, who successfully balances as if on tightrope between photography and adjacent media, posed the question of the origin of the staging and the object itself in the proverbial space with a post-photographic installation. The awareness that a medium can never be innocent but reflects an explicit, formative and accountable meaning was intrinsically linked to her work.
In ‘The Wavering Stage’ Lay and Verhees allowed the view through their own glasses. The framing of this view, which the artists granted to the viewer, resembled a balanced science. In the end, the joke of mediation became the decisive factor, shaking the notion of the stage as a medium and openly questioning the reality of object and staging.
Images © Alessandro De Matteis & Houtan Nourian