CONNECT

Mo BECHA & Regine SCHUMANN
spring 2003

Mo Becha (°1970, Ghent) combines a passion for sounds, in the form of soundscapes and soundsculptures, with work as a DJ. He makes sound installations for specific spaces. He is a sound collector. In constructions sometimes endearingly knocked together, he examines the sculptural qualities of sound, the way it moves in space, and how it is related to the form from which it originates. He himself talks more about atmospheres and sound collages than musical compositions. The hissing of the loudspeaker is just as good a starting point as electronic music. His installations introduce new relationships between form and sound and have a very evocative effect on the visitor, who usually has to interact in order to grasp the scope of the complete installation.

A striking element in Mo Becha's artistic progress is his joint ventures with other artists such as David Neirings and DD Trans and now with Regine Schumann. This has resulted in several exhibitions (Gallery In Situ, several art fairs, public spaces,...).

Regine SCHUMANN engages a unique aesthetic language with which she creates spaces filled with color and light: materials and objects that possess fluorescent properties.

Depending on the actual exhibition site, these objects reveal their specific textures and colors relative to the combination of natural and artificial light exposed to their surface. Plastics and vinyl strings that appear to be translucent and smooth when looked at in daylight, or fabrics and acrylic tiles that seem to be made of soft, solid colors when viewed in artificial light, all turn into luminous bodies of light under the exposure of blacklight where they appear to emerge from their material base and extend their coloured halos into the surrounding space. The form of the circle as a perfect geometrical shape and a metaphor for the continuum of time had already been explored by the artist in one of her previous exhibitions by transposing it on to the material form of the disc.

After printing lumilux pigments on to their surface and affixing rolls to the bottom, fifty of these equally sized "night owls" were released on to the floor where they floated, as "shining islands", across an imaginary blue-black ocean. Far removed from any "continent", these variable pop lights emanated their light unperturbed in an artificial global sea. Perhaps these "shining islands" embody the idealized and romanticized notion of nature and light on distant tropical islands, or describe one's gaze into outer space through its incomprehensibly permanent and light-streaked darkness.

In her latest projects, however, Schumann unsentimentally sets aside the pursuit of the unattainable and transcendent and turns her fluorescent discs into carpeted islands that enter our personal, day-to-day living space. In this installation, Schumann's world literally becomes tangible - a convergence of her complex artistic vision and its unmediated experience. As was apparent in her previous works, Schumann's art neither depicts nor portrays. Instead, it patterns - with threads of light and fabric, and thus disrupts our perception through the artist's unattached and nonrepresentational gaze. With an eye for color, contours, and textures as seen in their relationship to space, Schumann's images principally remain "empty" and thus are unfit for consumption, analysis, or purchase in any conventional sense. Alternatively, pictorial information is conveyed through light - an integration of physical objects into the factualities and signals of our past and present that the artist re-views and newly transmits. Schumann's lights are searching as much as they are exposing. They are questions rather than statements. Their production and reception remain both transparent and endless. As such, Schumann's exhibitions offer a visual challenge that stimulates different levels of temporal, spatial, and metaphorical awareness which, in turn, creates an atmosphere of participation, if not humanity. The result is a thought-provoking art experience that neither fits the visitor's wish for its immediate material availability nor presents itself as manageable in terms of conventional gallery or business hours: light art in difficult space.