
Screen Test for a Living Sculpture
2012
multi-channel monitor installation
three 1 min loops
in collaboration with Sini Pelkki
commissioned by Creative Time and MoMAPS1 for MTV’s Art Breaks
Jani Ruscica (born 1978) is an artist whose works explore the layers of representing place. The properties of place can be defined with the means of language, sound and image in a work of art. Although Ruscica appears to take these means of expression to their extremes, the properties of place are not, however, exhaustively addressed in this manner; something will always remain in a blind spot, unverified and unspecified.
The artist’s new video piece 10-minute display of unparalleled grandeur is a dialogue of these different means of expression or “languages”. Each one of them seeks to pass on the experience of three-dimensionality: language richly describing the colours and forms of natural phenomena; music imitating the sounds of nature; and images seeking via stereoscopy and 3D simulation to provide the most three-dimensional picture possible of the represented places.
While aiming at the most perfect representation possible with various means of expression, Ruscica also accepts the presence of mediating factors in the artwork. In fact, he aims at it. For example, images photographed through a stereoscope are blurry, because the stereoscope is meant for the human eye and not for the lens of a camera.
In Ruscica’s new works, the main aspect is the relationship of the image with three-dimensionality, even sculpturality. The new works are located in space as installations, taking on three-dimensional form, and even the images of the video works relate to sculpturality and the mediation of the three-dimensional experience.
Galerie Anhava’s publication Jani Ruscica: Anecdoctal is the first monograph to appear on the work of the artist.