Peter Coffin
11 Feb - 10 May 2009
PETER COFFIN
New Curve Art Commission
11 February 2009 - 10 May 2009
For The curve, his largest installation ever in the UK, Peter Coffin presents video footage of several Japanese gardens, gathered using multiple cameras mounted to a small, remote-controlled helicopter. Projected onto the outer wall of the gallery, a spectacular arc, this footage forms a continuous yet disjunctive landscape, marked by shifts in perspective and scale.
Coffin uses sound to further alter our sense of space. In various positions in the gallery, the visitor encounters the soundtrack of someone whistling, which is played back across a series of directional speakers. Coffin also presents a number of sculptures based on organic and man-made objects, which have been rendered using a three-dimensional scanner and distorted to create spatial opposites that confound our notions of representation.
The artist’s interest in gardens stems from the fact that the Japanese notion of landscape, which in painting appears rather flat and eschews a central focal point, contrasts with the Western idea of representation based on vanishing point perspective. Similarly, Japanese gardens make use of other illusionistic effects, such as overlapping elements and multiple points of focus, to create a sense of depth and scale. When projected on the 90-metre length of the gallery, the spatial ambiguity of the garden footage is further exaggerated, emphasizing its flatness and horizontality. The viewer is only able to see a portion of the imagery at a time, in effect turning The Curve into an enormous hand scroll.
In his sculptures, installations, photographs and videos, Peter Coffin examines our knowledge and interpretation of the world with curiosity and wit. Born in California in 1972, he received a graduate degree from the prestigious research institution, Carnegie Mellon University. Coffin’s artistic practice is similar to pure science and results in works which can be understood as alternative models to out conventionally accepted paradigms. He borrows from numerous other disciplines, such as art history, mysticism and New Age beliefs to test his ideas about the way things work. For example, Coffin has investigated the beneficial effects of music by arranging for DJs and sound artists to perform for plants in Untitled (Greenhouse) (2002). In a recent project, Untitled (UFO) (2008), he flew a 7-metre aluminium craft over Gdansk, Poland in an attempt to see if there is an increase in reported UFO sightings during times of political and economic conflict.
New Curve Art Commission
11 February 2009 - 10 May 2009
For The curve, his largest installation ever in the UK, Peter Coffin presents video footage of several Japanese gardens, gathered using multiple cameras mounted to a small, remote-controlled helicopter. Projected onto the outer wall of the gallery, a spectacular arc, this footage forms a continuous yet disjunctive landscape, marked by shifts in perspective and scale.
Coffin uses sound to further alter our sense of space. In various positions in the gallery, the visitor encounters the soundtrack of someone whistling, which is played back across a series of directional speakers. Coffin also presents a number of sculptures based on organic and man-made objects, which have been rendered using a three-dimensional scanner and distorted to create spatial opposites that confound our notions of representation.
The artist’s interest in gardens stems from the fact that the Japanese notion of landscape, which in painting appears rather flat and eschews a central focal point, contrasts with the Western idea of representation based on vanishing point perspective. Similarly, Japanese gardens make use of other illusionistic effects, such as overlapping elements and multiple points of focus, to create a sense of depth and scale. When projected on the 90-metre length of the gallery, the spatial ambiguity of the garden footage is further exaggerated, emphasizing its flatness and horizontality. The viewer is only able to see a portion of the imagery at a time, in effect turning The Curve into an enormous hand scroll.
In his sculptures, installations, photographs and videos, Peter Coffin examines our knowledge and interpretation of the world with curiosity and wit. Born in California in 1972, he received a graduate degree from the prestigious research institution, Carnegie Mellon University. Coffin’s artistic practice is similar to pure science and results in works which can be understood as alternative models to out conventionally accepted paradigms. He borrows from numerous other disciplines, such as art history, mysticism and New Age beliefs to test his ideas about the way things work. For example, Coffin has investigated the beneficial effects of music by arranging for DJs and sound artists to perform for plants in Untitled (Greenhouse) (2002). In a recent project, Untitled (UFO) (2008), he flew a 7-metre aluminium craft over Gdansk, Poland in an attempt to see if there is an increase in reported UFO sightings during times of political and economic conflict.