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Lothar Schmitz: Survival Strategies
Lothar Schmitz is an artist and a physicist. Lothar Schmitz: Survival Strategies, on view from January 24 to April 13, 2008, includes a variety of new site specific installations and features miniaturized three-dimensional synthetic and simulated landscapes that combine natural substances with artificial materials. These controlled environments include a large salt flat in Permeation (2008), to be constructed in the center court gallery, and a multi-channel video installation Biomorph (2008) which investigates the biological processes of plant cells, using time-lapsed imagery.Artist Statement
The installations in “Kunstwelten” (Worlds of Art) address evolutionary uncertainty and the paradox of our decreasing ability to define what nature really is.
Two installations suggest futuristic “engineered” environments, part botanical garden, part decorative landscaping, part genetic laboratory. Drawing on idealized clichés of idyllic natural settings, the templates of corporate landscaping, and the ubiquitous references to nature in interior design, they amalgamate ecologically diverse environments. As miniature landscapes, concocted from artificial grass and trees, rocks, and greenery, they suggest an improbable mix of plant species and locales, becoming contrived artifacts, distorted in scale, and dysfunctional. These installations also allude to hybridization and the transgression of inter-species boundaries.
One older installation, Large Organism, parodies the renaissance notion of the human body as a machine, governed by the then newly discovered Newtonian laws of physics. This notion exemplified the “mechanistic” worldview, which eventually led to the separation of scientific and artistic (humanistic) disciplines. In Large Organism, an interconnected network of tubing appears to circulate red fluid between several reservoirs. This installation has been previously shown at the Phoenix Museum of Art and at the UCSB University Art Museum.
The planned final components of the exhibition primarily uses video projections and investigates weather phenomena, using both time-lapsed imagery of actual weather phenomena and animated weather maps. Projection onto the gallery walls as well as onto shaped translucent screens is presently considered.
Image credit:Lothar Schmitz, Versuchsgelaende, (detail) 2005, Artificial turf, trees, and moss, acrylic glass, 7' x 6' x 1.5', courtesy of the artist;
