Demonstration of Gravity

by Alex Wisser

 

“Demonstration of Gravity” is a development of the photo series, “How come when I hurt you I don’t feel it?”.  It resulted from the photo shoot of the man holding the cow’s heart in the middle of the city, which took a long time and we did many different setups.  The model began to complain that the heart was getting heavy, which I thought was so beautiful.  It occurred to me while reviewing the series of shots taken that the work would function better as a video.  The idea was that the video would last for as long as I could physically hold the brick.  In the end the video went for 40 minutes because that was how long the tape was.  Again, by placing myself in the existent context of the crowded street as a contrived disruption, the reality of the context would reveal itself. This time though, you could watch it emerge.  The difference in intensity between the subject and the ground became very important as the viewer’s gaze and interest shifted between the painful monotony of my ordeal and the tumultuous diversity of the city revealing itself as it quickly passed.  I would like to further develop this project by staging it in many different locations and showing the results in a single show, hopefully allowing for a comparison between the different experiences.

How come when I hurt you I don’t feel it?

by Alex Wisser

This is a number of photographs from a series I shot for my honours project at the National Art School in 2009.  These were printed up at a meter wide and really I would have liked to see them larger.

Artist Statement:

Inserting a contrived element into a ‘real’ or existent context causes a collision between the two. I then photograph the accidents this produces.  In this way I constrain the tendency to impose a conception onto the scene and instead invite it to reveal something I can’t expect.  What I’m attempting is to relieve the photograph of it’s supposed claim to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, without abdicating its ability to refer directly to the world.  By openly lying to your face, I am hoping we can get beyond the now tedious debate around the artificial nature of the photograph to look into the ambiguous world, at once real and unreal, it is capable of revealing.