Alwin Lay
area: Visual Art
Key Facts
nationality
Germanyarea
Visual Artresidence
Colognerecommending institution
Sternenpassagetime period
April 2024 - April 2024Alwin Lay works with and through the media of photography, video, installation and sculpture. His starting point is the object as a projection surface for desires, wishes and expectations. It is often precisely in this transfer that small, unobvious but well-placed errors, planned modifications and surreal voids occur. The artist choreographs everyday objects with great precision in spatial situations that develop differently than intended during the process. This type of presentation not only leaves behind irritation and even disappointment, but often also an identification of the recipients with what is shown: the precisely staged and oversized objects (sparklers, cleaning sponges, kitchen scissors) seem to carry almost human characteristics - namely those that the viewers attribute to them themselves. They contain: Moments of failure, tragedy, humor. This is directly juxtaposed with Lay's exaggerated, over-aestheticized depictions of the photographic medium itself (greatly enlarged rolls of film, photographic paper, perforations, cameras, spotlights) and photo-technical processes, with which he once again demonstrates the false promises, but also unshakeable hopes, that photography has brought with it since the beginning of its discourse.
Earthrise
Apollo 8 was the first manned mission to land on the moon in December 1968. This event was of great importance in the power-political relations of the time in various ways, above all because of its media marketing and dissemination. The television broadcast was a great sensation, but so was the photographic footage. Claims quickly emerged that questioned the authenticity of these images and various theories developed, some of which became quite well known, that the moon landing was a media staging with political dimensions.
Without Alwin Lay attributing any truth to these theories, they have aroused his interest with their media-reflexive and technically detailed justifications. Pretty much all of these theories are based on the idea that the moon landing was staged "in the studio". At the time, Stanley Kubrick had already shot the film "2001: Space Odyssey" and used the montage technique of "front projection", the predecessor to the "green screen", to unprecedented perfection. The conspiracy theories therefore follow the causal connection that Stanley Kubrick must have shot the footage from the moon - and that it can be assumed with certainty that an artificial background was inserted into the studio shots with the help of "front projection" in order to achieve this quality of footage. Now there are various, sometimes very detailed technical image analyses of certain photos from the NASA archive of the Apollo missions that reveal their alleged studio staging. These image analyses sometimes read like instructions on how the photos must have been taken.
It is precisely these instructions that the artist wants to follow during his residency at the MQ and, above all, work out the supposed "mistakes" and "exposures".
On Sat 18.05., 18.30h Alwin Lay opens his exhibition "Frontprojektion" at Sternenpassage.