Scan I and II
Site-specific high resolution scans of concrete walls, Lambda prints mounted on Dibond, 107 x 212 cm
Site-specific high resolution scans of concrete walls, Lambda prints mounted on Dibond, 107 x 212 cm
Stilleven (blauw), Lambda print mounted on Dibond, 2016, 78 x 52 cm
Visite II
Site-specific installations, mixed media, Villa Van Wassenhove, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle (BE), 2018, room-filling set-up
In her research, Sarah Westphal departed from the idea of the Brutalist Woning Van Wassenhove (1970-74) as ‘an inner landscape’, a concept that occupies a central place in the practice of architect Juliaan Lampens. The house, a classified heritage monument, seems folded inward and is offering strikingly different observation levels and a lookout. It is an enclosed space, cast in situ and anchored to a site that is often compared to a cave.
Westphal creates different routes for the visitor within this ‘landscape’. She goes along with Lampens' thinking, but not with his visual language. Her work challenges the existing image of the Van Wassenhove house (which is mainly known from classical architectural photography) by shifting the visuals to create contradictions, new meanings and associations. Her artistic interventions do not aim to exhibit her own work, but rather to encourage the precise reading and concrete experience of the house.
In a scenography with a number of site-specific interventions, such as a stranded carpet, the artist outlines a new ground plan for the house. This happens with work that is specially made for the site and with work that already existed, but that is now physically and intrinsically inserted and woven into the plan.
Because Lampens is very attentive to the materiality of architecture, Westphal focuses on the skin of the interior. 'Architecture is like a skin you live in,’ Lampens said. This attention can be connected with 'corporeality' in Lampens’ as well as in Westphal’s work. Westphal has brought in a mobile scanning studio which enables her to look slowly and deeply at this architectural skin in situ. She wants to get beyond what is already known through photographs of the house. The scanner, which was also used in the restoration process and scientific research of The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (1432) by the Van Eyck brothers, takes high-resolution images, which she then enlarges as microscopic observations. Do the scanned images become a universe or a time capsule that opens up?