Collage Machine, 2006

88 durable ink-jet prints, nails, 413 x 286 cm

Left: installation view Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam

Right: detail and installation view ACF, Amsterdam

"What if one day we woke up metamorphosed like Gregor Samsa? If the objects surrounding us had suddenly started to look slightly different, although keeping a strange feeling of familiarity? The works of Gwenneth Boelens prove that there is no need for radical gestures, like that of turning into a cockroach, in order for us to acquire a new perspective on the quotidian spaces we most of the times don’t question but simply inhabit. In her installations, photographs or performances, she exercises this interrogation through subtle changes in the space or in the images themselves: compressions, reversals, additions or extractions. So that when she seems to give us the recording of a quiet interior or of a plant’s growing, in fact she introduces a tension meant to dislocate the pre-conceived image we might have had of thatparticular space or process. This tension can appear very literal, as a physical confrontation, crowding of objects/ persons or it is regarded in its temporal course, by the registering of the same space over a period of time (Collage Machine, 2006). In this last work the reconstitution of the space in the photographs suggests the difficult process of remembering; the play with bi- and tri-dimensionality reveals its illusionary character, while the careful selection of the juxtaposed moments reminds us of the constructed nature of memory." (Written by Raluca Voinea (RO), 2006)

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