Room With A View, 2021.
Oil paint on wood, 9,5m x 4m x 2m (approx. 30′ x 13′ x 6.5′)
© 2021 Elizabeth Gerdeman
Installed in Kaisitz, Germany, with the support of Offspace Kaisitz and the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony (KdFS). Images courtesy of the artists.
Room With A View approaches perspectives of the rural environment through the framing of landscape. The site-specific intervention explores the peripheric, focused on the edge of areas with no designated common spaces. Forming the basic outline of a room, the project consists of a minimal structure, whose surface is embellished with radiant colors that both reflect and elaborate on the surroundings—the ever-changing sky, fields, roads, and buildings.
In this project, a sense of play with notions of interior and exterior environments, and their perceived boundaries, is presented through the invocation of openings. Ostensibly, a window, door, and floor are outlined using wood-framed lines of demarcation. Simplified gradients of color exaggerate presentations that do not shrink from kitsch, such as the charged emblems of sunrise and sunset, and remind us that these types of Romantic facets continue to frame perspectives and desires for the places we inhabit today. Here, color brings to the forefront the role that emotions (namely hope and desire) and time (beginnings and endings) engage when perceiving landscape. The frame structure additionally calls into question whether a communal space or a space for encounter might exist within such a delicate, vulnerable structure, and similarly fragile peripheral locations. The project functions as a testing site to reflect on the relationships that form, the limits and obstacles that exist, and the impact this has on the landscape and the surrounding people—potentially evolving new means to convert such reflections into a radical contemporary vocabulary.
Room With A View, which is intended as an ongoing international project to be realized at various venues and locations, is also intended as a space of reflection and examination of the yearning for representations of nature within our daily lives and environments, as well as our continued distance from it. In a society marked by increasing mobility and dwindling social bonds, as people long for safe places and redemptive perspectives, this situation is also reflected in our current field of artistic interests. How we now view, live, and gather within the countryside as a place of domestic dwellings, as offering the possibility for escape, yet remaining contained within perimeters, are some of the questions that Room With A View poses. Through this project, a framing device is offered that is minimal and simplistic in scale, yet potentially magnificent in scope, as a platform for such questions to take shape.
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