The Columns Gallery Singapore is pleased to present Michael Wesely’s first solo exhibition in Singapore with the beautiful Giverny photo works and Open Shutter at The Museum of Modern Art, which captures the evolution of MoMA during its most challenging building project.
In 2016, a digital camera mounted on an almost invisible tripod took pictures of the life of the water lilies on the water on the east side of Claude Monet’s Water Lily Pond. These pictures started in the middle of May 2016 and ended in November that year, with a total of 75,000 photos, taken one after the other with a 90 second exposure from sunrise to sunset. All pictures of one day are combined to one single exposure of a day, and all day-long-pictures could be combined following in the tradition of Wesely’s work in long exposure since the late 80‘s. However, the development and reflection on our contemporary life made this project shift into a wider approach wishing to create contemporary images. What you see here are different long-time frames, from different phases of the summer, mounted together as time collages.
These works give up on the coherence of a time span in one photograph, they represent the multiplicity of fragments, of different time durations, all held together by the location. These images do not come close to “the” or “a” specific moment of recorded time, that is the guidance of our understanding of photography. The comparison of these images to the night sky, full of stars, maybe come close in understanding, considering that the light of some many stars is thousands of years old or even much older, while at the same time, many other stars carry light, that is just some seconds, weeks or centuries old.
They all share their different age and continuity under the same sky in our daily nights. And it might as well be compared to these images in our daily life, that is giving up more and more on a single continuity, towards a multiplicity of virtual rooms, that we are squeezing ourselves through a more and more advanced speed. Past and future, decades and weeks collide with seconds and months every day a bit faster, creating new qualities in a liquid modernity. This liquidity is to be understood as truly positive aspect of our modern life and a reflection how to use all these possibilities well.
For more than a decade, Michael Wesely (German, b. 1963) has been inventing and refining techniques for making photographs with unusually long exposures—some as long as three years.
Venue: The Columns Gallery
Blk 22 Lock Road #01-35 Singapore 108939
Opening Hours: Tuesday to Friday: 11am — 7pm
Saturday: 11am — 6pm, Closed on Mondays & Public Holidays
When: 20 Nov 2020 - 9 Jan 2021,
