Olafur Eliasson
Your welcome reflected, 2003
Collection
Color-effect filter glass (blue, red), motors, HMI lamp, tripod
Glass ø 75 cm each, dimensions variable
Olafur Eliasson has created an extensive oeuvre of optical devices dedicated to “seeing differently.” These installations complicate and recompose acts of perceiving and being in space through a visual aid, a prosthetic apparatus that allows us to become, for a while, enhanced humans. In Your welcome reflected, a powerful spotlight, directed horizontally through the space at eye level, serves as the primary light source. Two discs of color-effect filter glass are suspended from the ceiling and rotate slowly. Only a limited range of the spectrum of visible light can pass through each disc, while light from the remaining range is reflected. As a result, spots of complementary colors are cast on the walls. Because the slow-moving discs are not synchronized, these projected areas of color meet, coincide, and overlap, generating a seemingly endless number of combinations of colored circles and ellipses. The individual perception of colors is indicated to the viewers so that we recognize ourselves as knowing subjects. When visitors enter this revolving, intense color space, their bodies introduce additional refracting effects into the play of colors, amplifying what are now no longer peripheral effects.
Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1967. Lives in Copenhagen, Denmark and Berlin, Germany.
Glass ø 75 cm each, dimensions variable
Olafur Eliasson has created an extensive oeuvre of optical devices dedicated to “seeing differently.” These installations complicate and recompose acts of perceiving and being in space through a visual aid, a prosthetic apparatus that allows us to become, for a while, enhanced humans. In Your welcome reflected, a powerful spotlight, directed horizontally through the space at eye level, serves as the primary light source. Two discs of color-effect filter glass are suspended from the ceiling and rotate slowly. Only a limited range of the spectrum of visible light can pass through each disc, while light from the remaining range is reflected. As a result, spots of complementary colors are cast on the walls. Because the slow-moving discs are not synchronized, these projected areas of color meet, coincide, and overlap, generating a seemingly endless number of combinations of colored circles and ellipses. The individual perception of colors is indicated to the viewers so that we recognize ourselves as knowing subjects. When visitors enter this revolving, intense color space, their bodies introduce additional refracting effects into the play of colors, amplifying what are now no longer peripheral effects.
Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1967. Lives in Copenhagen, Denmark and Berlin, Germany.
