View With a Room

Galleria Makina
Kapitolinski Trg 1
52 100 Pula

Exhibition : 20.07– 21.08.13
opens Friday 19.07.13 at 21h

Exhibition opens every day from 11h – 14h and 19h – 23h

View with a room, brings together a body of works by artist Minnie Weisz. Weisz’s photographs are born out of her interest in the identity of spaces, particularly derelict buildings on the cusp of change –Victorian warehouses to abandoned hotels in London’s King’s Cross, to the Thames river.

Weisz investigates the surroundings and social history of these sites. Sometimes people are present, often she creates installations with found objects – a suitcase, an old pair of roller skates – to author fictional memories of a buildings past, creating an ode to each room she encounters. Each portrait of a room is a mirror to memory and time.

In search of the soul of a building and highlighting the materiality of the architecture, Weisz turns these deserted spaces into a camera obscura. Allowing light in through the pinhole of a darkened room, this technique inverts the outside view, projecting it back on to the walls inside. In this way, as the artist explains, the camera obscura is ‘ the key which unlocks a dialogue between exterior and interior worlds, a connection is made, a relationship is formed, each reflected in the other’.

By incorporating the principle of the camera obscura technique in her work, Minnie Weisz captures these exterior scenes which bathe the interior walls of the rooms, in total darkness, except a pinhole of light, she focuses a medium format camera at the interior view and exposes the film, exposures can take 3 – 5hrs, to capture a still image; this technique marks the beginnings of photography and the moving image. The method of Camera Obscura has a long history in photography and art. Its history begins with Aritstotle, also Da Vinci who experimented with this process and later painters for example Vermeer used various camera obscura contraptions to understand perspective in the landscape.

Film poems : ‘ The Eternal Present ‘ 16mm, 9 minute time-lapse film. ‘ Ruby’s room’ 5 minute video loop

Minnie Weisz studied Communication Art and Design at The London College of Printing and The Royal College of Art, London. Exhibiting in London, Edinburgh and Istanbul, solo shows at the London Architecture Festival 2006 – 2009, Istanbul Contemporary Art Fair 2007, The London Photography Festival 2012, ‘ Camera Obscura’ at the London Film Museum 2013, where she is currently artist in residence.

Her work is published in ’100 Visual Ideas ‘ by John Ingeldew, 2011, ‘ 100 ideas that changed Photography’ by Mary Warner Marien, 2012, ‘ Photography Porfolio’ by John Ingeldew, Lorentz Gullachsen, 2013 all published by Laurence King, London.