The work of younger generation sculptor Nika Erjavec provides a point of contact for various facets of sculpting that are placed in the context of changes of stimulus which result from the industrialisation and digitalisation of society. At the core of her interest is the relation between the visible and what eludes that, and represents a basis for an undisturbed perceiving and experiencing of the world. These are systemic issues of perception, its material foundations and the fragile relations between its elements.
In the exhibition (In)visible Landscape / (Ne)vidna krajina, Nika Erjavec presents a new sculpture installation composed of kinetic structures supported by the physical phenomenon to which she has been consistently devoted in recent years: vibration. Although on the level of healthy human perception this is identified as a deviation from the specific “smooth surface” of our balanced position, vibration is omnipresent on our most basic, atomic level. Everything vibrates at every moment. Changes in wavelengths, which enable a precisely determined intensity of wavelength and which we perceive as vibration, become the subject of the sculptor’s enquiry in this project. In the work of Nika Erjavec the ephemeral takes on physical characteristics, while the material becomes elusive and appears less and less as a solid support. The sculptural installation in Banka Slovenije’s Little Gallery presents just such a shifting landscape, in which the contact of the invisible and material creates an evasion of clarity on which our trust in the world and our place in it are based. Vibration is not just transmitted through direct physical, tactile contact, but also affects our view and in this way creates a parallel, unstable system in which we no longer feel at home.
With her installation the artist indulges the visitors, allowing them to control the contamination of their perception at the exhibition. We ourselves are invited into her sculpting through vibration, since in a fun, slightly self-ironic way she places a few of her sculptures at the control of a gaming console. Yet rather than a resolution on the playfulness of perception, the exhibition subtly steers one to a consideration of the ways in which our interventions are fateful not just for us as physical and spiritual beings, but also, as Jure Detela calls them, “beings from other worlds”. Our compromised view of the exhibition is therefore perhaps a metaphor for changed circumstances of living in a system in which we are in no way ourselves.
Artist: Nika Erjavec
Mentor: Prof. Alen Ožbolt
MGBS Curator: Vladimir Vidmar
Technical assistance: Janez Grošelj
Production: University of Ljubljana, Academy of Fine Arts and Design
