Series of Works
transformed object
Object, installation, print, work on paper, painting
1998
In 1998, Weyermann created a room-sized installation in a Berlin art gallery that embraced the tension between perspective and perception while also allowing the viewer to physically experience it. The title of the exhibition transformed object is borrowed from the function of a computer graphics program that makes it possible to transform two-dimensional shapes into three-dimensional spatial objects. The two chipboard rhombuses, which are placed on scaffolding poles and attached to the ceiling, have been installed in the gallery Kunstruimte, but with the surface area halved in relation to the original space, and rotated by 192 degrees. In each case the mid point between the corners in the main room and side room of the gallery have been marked, the points are connected, and two rhomboids constructed from the rectangular shapes that have now become visible. In a next step, the two objects are rotated and swapped over, so that the small rhomboid can fit easily into the gallery space, while the larger one bursts out of the smaller space. Its volume swallows up a wall between the two spaces and its full size can only be surmised. The objects hover above visitors on two-metre-high scaffolding poles, confronting them with a room-in-room situation as they stand in the exhibition space.
The real, accessible space and its integrated spatial volumes, which seem to defy the laws of gravity and the limits of the physical space, as if in the virtual domain, come from a process of translating simulated computer graphics into an expansive exhibition. A pattern has been drawn on the untreated chipboard in graphite, thereby achieving an additional illusionistic three-dimensional effect. This pattern picks up on the outline of the body, leading to the impression of seeing stacked cubes. The construction process adopted for the flat shapes in the installation is thus repeated virtually, taking on another layer of spatial nesting.
Angelika Stepken sees the rhombus pattern, which was used widely as ornamental flooring in the Renaissance era, as Weyermann citing the invention of the central perspective, which can be situated as “similarly incisive to three-dimensional orientation as the pixelated spaces of the digital era”.1 The installation transformed object (36.17) represents a key transitional moment in the artist’s work, where real space is expanded into the virtual dimension.
1 Stepken, Angelika: “transformed object”, in Weyermann, Maja: transformed object, exh. cat. Kunstruimte, Berlin 1998, unpaginated.