Inscription: Hoegen&Stikker (Philippine Hoegen and Carolien Stikker)
September 19 – November 29, 2009
Alice and Horace Chandler Gallery and North Gallery
Artists' Lecture September 16, 6:30pm, SUNY New Paltz Lecture Center 100
Inscription (formerly with the working title Riverbank) is an artist-residency-based multimedia investigation of perception, representation, and the Hudson River by Amsterdam-based artists Philippine Hoegen and Carolien Stikker. The exhibition was commissioned by the Dorsky Museum as part of an artist residency program celebrating the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s exploration of the Hudson River.
Hoegen&Stikker, Hill, Train, Boat (still), 2009
There are four works in the exhibition. In the video projection Hill, Train, Boat, it becomes apparent how perception of the landscape changes radically when order is imposed from the outside. Smoke no smoke is a slide and video projection installation which juxtaposes still and moving images of the same scene side by side, accentuating the different properties of—and viewers’ reactions to—still and moving images. In Waiting to Take the Picture, a set of hybrid photographic videos (video footage shot through a photo camera and presented on video monitors) combines the visual languages of the still and moving image. Seeing the photo camera’s crosshair in the center of the image (a still image on a video monitor), viewers are constantly reminded that we are looking not at the landscape, but at the landscape through an apparatus.
The fourth work in the exhibition is an artists’ book, Superstructure, by Philippine Hoegen and Carolien Stikker, which includes the essay text "Space is the Place" by Thomas Zummer. The book also contextualizes the exhibition, exploring in image and text ideas that inform the artists’ inquiries and procedures.
The exhibition, an artistic investigation of naming and perceiving that takes as its starting point the naming, mapping, and defining of the Hudson River, addresses fundamental questions about how we perceive and represent the world.
Hoegen&Stikker, Smoke no smoke (still), 2009
About the artists
Hoegen&Stikker is a collaboration between Philippine Hoegen and Carolien Stikker. Hoegen works with video and photography, searching for points of contact between the mediums. Using different layers of information to construct meaning within the work, her video installations show small or slow moving events, almost to the point of becoming stills, whilst photographic works are combined with sound or set in motion through slide sequences. Stikker applies mistakes and limits in photo and film techniques and procedures. She explores the boundaries of a medium, raising the question of how we perceive and what we see, through series of photographs. In the collaboration these approaches are applied, mixed, and rearranged. The work of Hoegen&Stikker consists of combinations of film and photography: video films which are shot through a photo camera (photographic video), and films resulting in series of stills (film print).
Untitled (pt2004), August 2004, Portugal, Photographic video, projected
Installation view: Gist Gallery NL, October 2005
Inscription is part of a suite of historical and contemporary exhibitions, programs, and publications produced by the museum to mark the quadricentennial of Henry Hudson's 1609 voyage on the river that now bears his name, and to note important artistic and cultural interpretations of that event.
