JONAH FREEMAN
Born in 1975, Santa Fe (USA). Lives in New York
Conference Room, 1998
Port Authority, 1998
Videos, colour
Courtesy of the artist and the Andrew Kreps gallery, New York
“Imagine that you are in a room somewhere in the Pacific. Perhaps it is at altitude, but you don’t know why there isn’t a window in the room. You don’t even know if the Pacific Ocean is outside, but they have told you it is, and later it could be true. Light comes from halogen neon lights specifically calibrated to offer variety of spectrum and colour temperature. You ask yourself how long you have been there, and it is in that moment that things become dark.” (Jonah Freeman, extract from a published text from a 1998 exhibition). Port Authority and Conference Room form part of a series of very simple videos that show a fixed plan of empty interiors that change slowly and alternatively across chromatic ranges, as if illuminated by coloured neon. Constructed situations that operate like a disappointing formalisation of Paul Scheerbart and of his Glass Architecture. If the German poet advocated the use of “more coloured light” and celebrated a night “maybe similar to day”, Freeman’s work reveals enclosed universes artificially maintained outside time, in which the unreal and abstract light creates discomfort more than absolute well-being.
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