Index

forest garden, breakfast tea

Katrin Hornek (Austria) and Sally Mannall (Australia), IG Bildende Kunst & AIR Artist in Residence Lower Austria, curated by Alexandra Hennig and Elke Smodics-Kuscher, 2–23 November 2012

In the exhibition FOREST GARDEN, BREAKFAST TEA, the artists focus on the blurriness of notions of nature and follow the movement between national parks, gardens, and spaces of artistic representation from Australia to Austria, via Canada.
Katrin Hornek’s work is also concerned with creating correlations: critical sites where nature is revealed as a highly-charged referential system within a field of tension created by processes of culture, history, and natural science. She moves in an allegedly public environment, in what might be called wilderness—whether in the urban space of a large city or in a national park. Here, she seeks out the historical, nomadic, and migratory/invasive movements of species, unmasking manifold efforts at »natural balance« as a utopian construct, created in order to justify grotesque strategies.

In POPCORN LANDSCAPES, Hornek drew a map linking Melbourne to the BANFF Centre in Canada, marking a topography which empirically evaluates traces of colonization and land appropriation. THE PARK RANGER is another work made in the BANFF Centre, showing the National Park’s surveillance manager and wildlife biologist in a television studio. Hornek’s staging of the scene alludes to Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting THE MONK BY THE SEA, but two hundred years later the view of endless space to a distant horizon has been replaced by the green screen of a television studio. Awe before nature’s sublime has been replaced by control mechanisms. Even the ranger, the embodiment of nature’s guardian, finds himself in front of a huge display which only has the color green in common with nature.


excerpt from the press-release

The Park Ranger after The Monk by the Sea, 130 × 89 cm, Banff Nationalpark (CA), Rice Studio, 2012

Katrin Hornek forest garden, breakfast tea
Katrin Hornek forest garden, breakfast tea

FAST FORWARD TO NATURE I, 2012 overheadprojector, construction debris, gypsum tiles

Katrin Hornek forest garden, breakfast tea

FAST FORWARD TO NATURE II, toothpicks, overheadprojektor, 2012

Katrin Hornek forest garden, breakfast tea

POPCORN LANDSCAPES, 2-channel video installation, 5 min, Melbourne (Australia), Banff Nationalpark (Canada)

Katrin Hornek forest garden, breakfast tea

Video still, POPCORN LANDSCAPES

Katrin Hornek forest garden, breakfast tea

Video still, POPCORN LANDSCAPES

Katrin Hornek forest garden, breakfast tea

In the exhibition FOREST GARDEN, BREAKFAST TEA, the artists focus on the blurriness of notions of nature and follow the movement between national parks, gardens, and spaces of artistic representation from Australia to Austria, via Canada.
Katrin Hornek’s work is also concerned with creating correlations: critical sites where nature is revealed as a highly-charged referential system within a field of tension created by processes of culture, history, and natural science. She moves in an allegedly public environment, in what might be called wilderness—whether in the urban space of a large city or in a national park. Here, she seeks out the historical, nomadic, and migratory/invasive movements of species, unmasking manifold efforts at »natural balance« as a utopian construct, created in order to justify grotesque strategies.

In POPCORN LANDSCAPES, Hornek drew a map linking Melbourne to the BANFF Centre in Canada, marking a topography which empirically evaluates traces of colonization and land appropriation. THE PARK RANGER is another work made in the BANFF Centre, showing the National Park’s surveillance manager and wildlife biologist in a television studio. Hornek’s staging of the scene alludes to Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting THE MONK BY THE SEA, but two hundred years later the view of endless space to a distant horizon has been replaced by the green screen of a television studio. Awe before nature’s sublime has been replaced by control mechanisms. Even the ranger, the embodiment of nature’s guardian, finds himself in front of a huge display which only has the color green in common with nature.


excerpt from the press-release