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Indepth Arts News:
"Roman Signer"
2001-11-30 until 2002-02-03
Camden Arts Centre
London, ,
UK
Roman Signer's 'sculptural moments' cause objects and phenomena to do things which they would not normally do. His work evolves from scrupulously prepared sculptural events which take place either in the Swiss mountains where he lives, and then dispatched in the form of a film, a photo sequence, or a video - or as site-specific events or installations.
Simple objects like balloons, buckets, a canoe, a bicycle, a rifle, water, explosives, are exposed to processes of movement or material transformation (melting, firing, catapulting, sinking, floating). All available expertise, inventiveness and experience is harnessed to activate the object and create a kind of successful fiasco in which anarchy can become poetic as an object is made to behave in an unprecedented or unforeseen way. His works make the everyday world visible as something ambiguously amusing that can turn inscrutable and frightening. Signer's recent disturbances have shifted away from the physical reality of the exploding object to ones which disrupt the mind.
Signer has been working since the mid 1970s, but only recently has the importance of his work become more widely recognised and his influence on younger generations of Swiss and international artists acknowledged. Roman Signer was born in 1938 in Appenzell, Switzerland, and has shown extensively in Switzerland, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and the United States.
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