Helga Steppan
Parallelistic Imitations
Parallelistic Imitation # 01
(Wood, Mirrors Perspex, Lamda Photographic Prints, 2,10 x 1,87 x 0,30 m)
Parallelistic Imitation # 03
(Mirrors Perspex, 60 x 114 x 60 cm)
Parallelistic Imitations, View of Exhibition Space
(Mirrors, Mirror Perspex, Lamda Photographic Prints,
Various Dimensions)
Tangra Me # 02
(Wood, Mirror Perspex, Various Dimensions (2 x 2 x 1.2 m))
Woodworks # 01
(Wood, 3 x 3 x 3 m)
Helga Steppan: Parallelistic l’imitation
The works of Helga Steppan meld the genres of photography, installation and sculpture. Steppan’s works almost always begin with the act of gathering and ordering - be it all of her possessions, as in the photographic series ‘See Through - All my things’ (2004), in which she categorised all of her belongings by colour, or the gathering of the multitude of reflective objects that became the site specific work ‘Mirroculous’ (2008). Steppan’s works playfully flit between the psychological realm of memories and associations and the ordered world of systems and classification. Rather than referring to classifications normally associated with the realm of the museum or sciences, Steppan uses her own unconventional and often playful set of criteria to organise forms and objects.
The interplay between the two and three dimensional has been a consistent interest of Steppan’s. Her photographic works are, invariably, sculptural in their origins, the final photograph a two dimensional trace of a three dimensional form. In her latest works, the use of photography moves beyond that of documentation, becoming both a starting point and vital element in the construction of her site specific installations. The gathering instinct seen in earlier works is reflected in these installations by her use of photography as a way of both garnering and organising information about the exhibition space. Steppan subsequently re-constructs the resulting images and information into new, sculptural forms which are placed back within the gallery. The inception of this process was first seen in her 2007 site specific work ‘The Spare Room’, in which Steppan created a dreamlike environment through an installation of photographs which appeared to mirror the very rooms that they occupied.
Similarly in ‘Parallelistic l’imitation’ Steppan has used the architectural features of Château de Sacy as her starting point. The resulting sculptures - geometric forms, constructed from mirrored surfaces and photographs of the spaces that they inhabit - immediately disorientate, interrupting and disrupting the spaces that they inhabit. In these fictitious environments, part mirror image, part photographic representation, we are both reflected and at another turn made absent. As the title of the exhibition suggests, the works allude to parallel universes, but Steppan’s other worlds are illusionary - an imagining and imitation of multi-dimensional space - and are therefore ultimately limited in their possibilities. We cannot pass through the invisible boundary of the mirrored surface or that of the photograph to enter into them.
Drawing influence from the utopian architectural designs of the 1950’s and 1960’s, from ‘Architectures Fantastiques’ and Le Corbusier’s belief in the mathematical order of the universe, Steppan’s at first perplexing structures, create worlds within worlds. The mirror, historically representational of a gateway into other dimensions or entry point into the subconscious, leads us into a never ending labyrinthine gaze. It is a ‘tricked gaze’ 1 but as Michel Foucault has also written, the mirrored world is both a utopia - a space which is ‘fundamentally and essentially unreal’ 2 in which we simultaneously are present but also not - and a ‘heterotopia’, a space between the real and utopian. In Steppan’s works, the relationship between what is real, what is reflection and what is reproduction draws our attention to the fact that what we are witnessing is an illusion, bringing our awareness back to our own place in space and time.
Jacqui McIntosh is an independent writer and curator based in London.
www.jacquimcintosh.com
1 Michel Foucault, ‘So Cruel a Knowledge’ in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James Faubion (Penguin Books, 2000), p60
2 Michel Foucault, ‘Different Spaces’ in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James Faubion (Penguin Books, 2000), p178
Previous Work
See Through - All My Things /White/, /Black/, /Yellow/, /Red/
C-Type Photographic Prints 30″ x 36″, 2004.
A photographic series in which I audited all my personal belongings and divided them into a full spectrum of colour groupings: White, Black, Yellow, Red, Blue, Pink, Green, Orange, Purple, Brown, Grey, and Miscellaneous. Nothing could be removed, borrowed or hidden away from the viewer when constructing all the objects together as installations to be photographed.
The Blind Spot / Döda Vinkeln
Mix-media Installation (Car Rear-View and Side Mirrors, D-type Photographic Prints,
Manfrotto Tripod Parts), 2 x 2.5 x 2.5 Meters, 2008
Site-specific Installation created for an exhibition at the CCP Car Park in Liverpool. Exploring the idea of the blind spot and what can be discovered through investigating the space together with its history. Working with rear view and side mirrors of a car together with photography and tripods to link the present to the past, creating a juxtaposition of the representational and reflected imagery.