The project “Two Mirrors” is a work bought before being realized: the regular process of production is upside down and in this case it goes from idea to collector to gallery. I wanted to make the project before delivering it to the collector, and asked Ellen de Bruijne to use her gallery space to bring the project into actual existence. The idea of “Two Mirrors” is simple. Two mirrors are created in the gallery space. One is a visual mirror, a video projection functioning as a mirror of the space, with two people populating the projected image. The second mirror is a sound mirror: a microphone registers both the sound of the video and the real-time sound (the space, the public), and brings them together through the speakers. So in “Two Mirrors” real and represented space mix, and the spectator looks at a space where he should be but he is not.
The impossibility of being in two places at once is roughly speaking the subject matter of “On/Off”. “On/Off” is a performance in the form of a lecture, in which an actor takes my place and my words to deliver them to the public. The way of presenting it implies that anybody could, at any time, take my place and my words about (sorry for the grandiloquence) art, life and death. Take my place: walk from one locked room into the next.”
(text by Dora García)
During his stay in New York, Jan Rothuizen got familiar with the drifters of this big city. He made portraits of them with an ‘instant 3-D camera’ , specially developed for children, with a 3-D effect we know of tacky postcards. The suggestion of the fairy tale generated by the 3-D effect is absurd or even inappropriate, but at the same time, this fairy tale-like atmosphere makes it conceivable that these people indeed are living their own story, without any connection towards the reality we know.
Exhibition: 09/12/00 – 20/01/01