Sascha Weidner
Galerie Zur Stockeregg Stockerstrasse 33 8022 Zürich Suisse
Galerie Zur Stockeregg, Zürich, 2009
With to be handled carefully, Sascha Weidner has created an art installation in which single photographs merge into a visual complex of high emotional intensity. The ability to offer visual toeholds to the beholder characterizes Weidner as a photographic poet and as an imaginative storyteller, as well. It is with great pleasure that Galerie Zur Stockeregg, for the first time in Switzerland, presents his work in a solo exhibition.
Sascha Weidner, born in 1976 in Osnabrück Germany, convincingly answers the question how analogue photography can persevere. By a rather exceptional way of hanging his works irrespective of their motive, size and year of production, but rather fusing them in a tessellated manner, Weidner creates expansive installations that provide an insight into his private pool of memories. Sure enough, all of Weidner’s works, be it portraits, landscapes, or still lifes, have their roots in his personal environment. In all of these genres, he alternates between near and distant vision, often using unconventional perspectives.
For Weidner, the process of creating an image has a very dynamic character; his work is not completed when the release button is pushed. Rather, a picture’s motive is subject to further development: By being rotated or even turned over (if, through this irritation, the image looks “right” to the artist), and by being exhibited in various combinations with other works, thus changing its context over and over again. Entering into a dialogue with each other, the photographs do not only widen their narrative potential, but also offer multiple toeholds for individual trains of thought to the beholder. The artist comments this effect by stating: “It’s all connected somehow…”
There can be no doubt about Sascha Weidner’s works being poetical, to some extent. He is a champion in capturing the magic of the moment, creating pictures whose aesthetics are rooted in the intensity of subjective perception, in personal desires, and in dream images. It is his special use of light that turns every image in an existential one. Seen through Weidner’s romantic eyes, human existence is documented as one approving the simultaneous coexistence of beauty and tremendousness. Oscillating between cheerfulness and melancholy, Weidner’s works are able to send the beholder on an emotional roller coaster ride which enables him to become aware of life’s ephemerality. As a consequence, the works call on the beholder to cherish every moment, which is reflected in the exhibition’s title. “To be handled carefully”, however, should also be understood as a warning: Do the scenes depict reality? Or are they rather manipulated?
The ability to consequently exploit and visualize the narrative qualities of photography characterizes Sascha Weidner as a modern storyteller. Amplifying a picture’s meaning by incorporating it into a group of works, he reveals its hidden narrative potential and, at the same time, creates an inimitable, permanently changing universe.