This installation has three separate components, a video projection, a miniature landscape and a totem of two surveillance televisions. Inspired by Caspar David Friedrich’s sublime painting The Wreck of Hope, the aggressive arctic landscape depicts the ruined remains of towers and antennas from some long lost technology breaking through the layers of ice and snow. Projected onto the gallery wall behind the landscape is what looks like a flowing night sky not unlike the aurora borealis. Placed within the miniature icy terrain are two pinhole video spy cameras, each looking out across the landscape from an ideal perspective. To the side of the landscape with the video backdrop are the two analog security televisions. On those two screens are the privileged perspectives of the live feeds from the cameras. What is seen on the screens is a beautiful but fragile simulation that combines the landscape with the projection. In one moment presents a world believable and strangely inviting, inspiring nostalgic feelings towards expeditions into the unknown. In the next moment the vastness of this world fades away as the hoax of the simulation becomes more clear. The screens become a mediator between what we see is real and what we imagine or what we wish we could see.
“Sublimity gathers around Vastness – vast power, size, height, depth, distance. Whatever seems endless, whether by repetition or uniformity, can induce a sense of the final Vastness, infinity itself. For Vastness points ultimately to the Infinite and the Obscure, realms beyond comprehension that can excite feelings of Terror and Horror.”