Karin van Dam at Begane Grond - Utrecht, The Netherlands - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In a former theater, part of a building which now houses an experimental artists' space, Karin van Dam created an environmental installation of monumental size and power through using modest and unimposing materials. It was an unstructur jury-rigged accumulation of parts reminiscent of Jessica Stockholder's large works, on the other hand while Stockholder uses existing manufactured particulars which already have an identity that can prompt meanings, van Dam makes greatest in quantity of her elements of big sheets of paper chop into ovals (often with destitute of contents centers) and blackened with pastel chalk. These are interspersed with thin pieces of lumber and various strings and cords.

Floating Parts, as this installation was called, stretched across a corner of the exhibition space and strike one as beinged to grow out of the walls and ceiling -- parts of which were also blackened -- as if it were a living organism. The sheets were suspended upon thin wires, and seemed to roll crawl or drape to the floor, where they were met and interrupted by the agency of a variety of disjunctive materials including make revolves of plastic foam, large pieces of polyester foam partly overspreaded with black velvet or black paper, and a turn of chicken wire. The piece as a whole direct the eyeed like a gigantic pop-up. it invited you to wander around and experience it from different angles. While moving, you became aware of the different intensities of black owed to the changing fall of light.

Van Dam creates her installations intuitively, guided by dint of the specific environment. Thus she at no time knows what the piece will direct the eye like until it has grown organically, upon the spot. She started her career in 1987 with moderate-size black pastel chalk drawings. Eventually, parts of these drawings broke away from the background and discloseed into collages, which she framed in shallow boxe In the nearest phase she freed the forms -- which wait oned to become bigger and bigger -- to exist independently in real space, with part of the drawings directly attached to the wall.

one time you know this, you diocese that Floating Parts is not for a like reason much a structure as a drawing or a collage. For this reason, van Dam has invented the boundary ontbonden tekenkunst (decomposed drawing) for her work. The background is no longer a sheet of paper or a wall, on the other hand space itself.

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