In her series Sites & Construction, Susa Templin explores the question of how spaces and memories permeate each other. Her photographic investigations lead to extensive installations. In the alternation of material and scale, models of paper and cardboard are created, which are photographed and further processed from different perspectives. They are independent sculptures and at the same time provide the motifs for further photographs.
The artist deals with images of memories that reappear in new compositions in spatial abstraction. Image by image and layer by layer, often by multiple exposures, the photographically captured space is deconstructed, distorted in perspective, and subjectively reassembled. Statics and perspective are suspended. Interior views become facades, exterior views become enigmatic interiors. The views distort optically and in reality in the folds of the folded picture walls.
Landscaping
Landscaping is a light installation that was made in the artist’s studio in New York. By using small plastic trees, the artist creates pieces of forest that develop a painterly effect in their coloring and spatial staggering. These models were photographed and inserted into the series in greatly enlarged form so that the realistic ‚playgrounds’ are juxtaposed with artificial miniature landscapes.
The light installation plays with a city dweller’s longing for nature. The extreme close-ups blur the background and give the impression of an unlimited forest. It is a play with proportions: toy trees proliferate monstrously, the viewer can lull himself into the dreamlike notion of being able to stay under trees. And it is a game with nature, the image of nature, our longing for it, and the idea we have of nature and landscape.
INDOORS LANDSCAPE, 2017, walk-in photo installation, Kunsthalle Mannheim, DE (permanent collection)
The winters on the Spree are cold, dark and mostly quite long. This was Susa Templin’s experience when she moved from New York to Berlin at the end of 2005. Shortly thereafter, when she received an invitation from the Berlinische Galerie to a solo exhibition, she responded to the winterly dreary city with a group of works created especially for the spatial situation of the museum. She called the cycle „Berlin Baroque,“ consisting of a large-format photo sculpture and a series of frameless photographs arranged in alternation of portrait and landscape format as a densely suspended, circumferential wall frieze. But the actual work began outside, in the cold space of the city: Here Susa Templin took photographs of typical Berlin apartment buildings, firewalls, and backyards and used them to build small architectural models in her studio. They reflect that urban dreariness, which then underwent a fulminant transformation in the further work process. Thus the artist brought the dismembered and newly assembled structures to life through the use of colorful tissue paper, glittering foil, and other hand, from which in the end – again photographed – plastic room collages of almost baroque appearance were created. This is not only due to the artistic intention to blur the boundaries between the genres of photography and sculpture beyond recognition. The cycle can be described as baroque above all because the trivial material is condensed into proliferating, moving, multi-perspective pictorial spaces of great visual splendor. The dominant feature here is an interplay of light and shadow, of razor-sharp and blurred parts of the picture, of shimmering paint and grey masonry, of architectural mass and organic uncontrolled growth, which triumphs over every attempt at spatial orientation in the narrow section of the picture. And this despite the fact that the tinkering character of the city fantasies, built in numerous variations, is never denied, but is clearly revealed through cut edges and other traces of processing. Susa Templin has supplemented these model photographs with a series of real interior photographs that she tracked down at night in Berlin’s urban space and which – mostly seen from the outside through large window panes – with their reflections and light effects unfold a similarly pompous effect. Well-dosdly integrated into the cycle, they tie back to reality, which the other works demonstrate by virtue of their illusion. Finally, the artist enlarged one of these photographs into an almost four-meter-high photographic sculpture that was mounted diagonally on the front wall of the exhibition space, from where it extended plastically to the floor. It formed the pivotal point of the spatial staging – and in its immediate, physical presence it illustrated what the entire image program of „Berlin Baroque“ is based on: a visionary proposal for the transformation of urban space, in which the limitations of the photographic medium are also lifted.
Dr. Stefan Rasche
