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MARIJKE VAN WARMERDAM
Born 1959, Niewer Amstel (Netherlands). Lives in Amsterdam
Dream Machine, 2006
35 mm video transferred to 16mm (2’56’’)
Courtesy of the artist and the Estrany de la Mota Gallery, Barcelona
The works of Marijke Van Warmerdam have something of both phenomenological analysis and a certain ghostly quality, exposing for judgement their own particular point of view. Her photographs, sculptures, and above all her videos, often originate from natural, physical and optical phenomena, which she transforms using the subliminal possibilities of film. Enlarged, de-contextualized staged happenings which take place in temporal suspension come to nullify the surrounding space, onto which she imposes her own scale and specific temporality.
Dream Machine, one of her most recent videos, is typical of this kind of optical metamorphosis. Milk being poured into a glass is transformed into a hypnotic visual experience, in which the change from transparency to complete opacity produces a fascinating, animated landscape in which the arabesques of the liquid gradually give way to a turbid monochrome. The title, Dream Machine, is an explicit allusion to the psychedelic machine constructed by the American writer Brion Gysin in the 1960s - a hallucination machine composed of a tube full of holes illuminated from the inside, the rapid rotation of which produces an epileptic effect on the retina. This same object was inspired by the irritating optical effect of a natural phenomenon, that of the flashing of the sun’s rays filtered through trees which Brion Gysin experienced during a bus journey at sunset. In the same way, Marijke Van Warmerdam’s Dream Machine multiplies the physiological effects of an ordinary phenomenon by means of cinematographic techniques, but with a more analytical and removed intention than mere psychtropia.
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