Germaine Kruip, Split Second

Nieuw Zuid

Gallery Sofie Van de Velde is pleased to announce Germaine Kruip's solo presentation, Split Second, providing an in-depth experience of the artist's ongoing concerns with time, perception, geometry and ritual. In the exhibition space's window sits a clock which counts down from four minutes to zero; inside, another clock counts upwards from zero to four. The light goes on, then out again. With A Room, 4 Minutes, Kruip urges the spectator to become aware of the room they are in, the space they occupy, and the time they spend there. The choreography of light and sound repeats itself endlessly. Nine duos of thin marble slabs lean against the wall. The abstract pattern of the marble lines is dou-bled within each pair. Two successive slabs of an Italian marble were cut and installed vertically to highlight their specific feature: a succession of black and white lines, resulting from a year of the ground's accumulation of matter. Kruip attempts to isolate time and draws attention to the almost-perfect simultaneous lines formed by each pair. Hung high across the room is the twelve-corner hand-crafted mirror Dodecagon Kannadi. Not intended for use as a mirror, Kannadis are ritual round objects produced by a single extended family in Aranmula in the district of Kerala, India. The exact metals used in the alloy are maintained as a zealously guarded family secret. Kruip's formal intervention into the procedural customs of the craft is her commissioning of different geometrical shapes, here a do-decagon representing a timeless clock, drawing a comparison between the process of abstraction inherent in ritualised practices of making. Lebron James is an on-going project consisting of reworked archival photographs, isolating the clouds of chalk that basketball player Lebron James throws in the air before every match. The sequence of clouds station, mid-air. Also embodying a momentum which is impossible to reproduce, Drop is an innovative custom-designed optical device that enlarges and projects the image of a falling drop of water in motion. In Drop the projector doubles up as a camera to make the individual 'live' moments of falling water visible to the human eye. Whilst actually producing 60 images of drops per second, the illusion perceived by the viewer is that of a couple of floating drops. This device explores the illu-sory quality of the moving image in film - which is in fact made of still images projected in sequence - that the human mind perceives as fluid sequences. A polished brass circle, suspended from the ceiling, reflects the theme of symmetry and doubling that is apparent throughout the presentation. The sculptural piece is at the same time a musical instru-ment that can be played with a metal beater, in a similar fashion to a triangle. Circle was manufac-tured by Thein Brass especially for Kruip. Finally, Kennedy consists of two photographs taken by the artist's father of a 1960s TV screen on which the late American President John F. Kennedy is pictured giving his last speech. Whilst the president addressed the nation on 'live' television, radio broadcast already announced he had been shot. Kruip's father's gesture of photographing the TV set reveals his recognition that this would be the last moment he would see the 'live' president, and yet, different temporalities overlapped in that instant.

Represented artist