Ralph Collier

For a couple of weeks artist Ralph Collier (°1990, BE) used the exhibition space of Tique | art space as a temporary studio. During this time, Collier used the exhibition space to develop and work on three separate projects.

First of all Collier prepared his upcoming exhibition chapter one ≈ chapter one at BIKINI, Basel. This group show was the result of a clash of appointments. There was one exhibition planed from Ralph Collier and Clarisse Bruynbroeck, another by Damiano Curschellas and Karen Amanda Moser. chapter one ≈ chapter one are two shows intertwined with each other, sharing the same realm to think about this misunderstanding. At Tique Collier wrote Floating Attention, a publication that coincided the exhibition. Floating Attention is conceived as a script that consists of transcripts of conversations, descriptions, future happenings in developing chapter one ≈ chapter one.

In his work Collier questions the nature of image, exhibition and reality by carefully unhinging their constitutive elements and meticulously modifying their fundamental or formal qualities. The artist reflects on the status of the image, what it can or should mean, and how it can be spectated, especially in the current culture of image overload. Collier used the time at Tique to research the same ungraspable zone of in-between-ness in his ongoing film project An Absence of a Presence. The piece provides a psychological portrait of the park Rivierenhof (Deurne, BE), the open-air theatre located there, and the surveilled condition of people now. With the crucial switch in perspective, the film attests to the idea that there is no strict dichotomy between the truth of what is present, and the falsity of what is absent, but rather that both are continuously mediated.

In his latest artistic-curatorial project Peripheral Vision, a research into optics has become the Leitmotiv. This project investigates the phenomena of what occurs outside the very center of gaze. It aims to articulate a method of display and a series of collaborative artworks that will explore the idea of visual imaging as an entity that corresponds to the boundaries of the visual field as a whole. Next autumn, this forthcoming project will be further explored in a exhibition at Tique | art space.