Like Mike Lacey’s comic ‘X-Ray Specs‘, the exhibition ‘The Wavering Stage’ also played with its asymmetrical information advantage over the environment. The viewer’s gaze on the couch – on the motif of the invitation card – corresponds to the gaze 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 mobilized the viewing habit. The objects depicted by him often functioned as open projection surfaces and thus infinitely deep association containers at the same time. Thus, Lay’s precise statements in the perception of the observer constantly moved back and forth between denotation and connotation.

Lorelinde Verhees, who successfully balances between photography and related media as if on tightropes, used a post-photographic installation to raise the question of the origin of the staging and the object per se in the proverbial space. The awareness that a medium can never be innocent but reflects an explicit, formative and responsible meaning was intrinsically linked to her work.

In ‘The Wavering Stage’, Lay and Verhees allowed a glimpse through their own glasses. The framing of this view, which the artists granted to the viewer, resembled a balanced science. Ultimately, the wit of the mediation became the decisive factor that makes the concept of the stage as a medium falter and openly questions the reality of object and staging.

Images © Alessandro De Matteis & Houtan Nourian