Karina Nimmerfall: Double Location

BUCKET RIDER GALLERY announces Double Location, new video installation and photographs by Karina Nimmerfall. This will be her second solo exhibition at the gallery. The show opens Friday, December 1st with an artist’s reception from 6-9 PM, and continues through January 27th.

Karina Nimmerfall: Double Location

With the use of installation, photographs and video Karina Nimmerfall investigates the phenomenon of fictional reality (created and designed by the media industry), the different patterns involved in the presentation of space and the impact current film and TV productions have on various concepts of constructing reality.

Space 1: Second Unit: New York

Installation, 2006 In the current project Second Unit Nimmerfall investigates ideas concerning the “cinematic map”: a filmic description of space and location used in Hollywood level productions, which seem to replace the actual “real” location by their (re)construction and presentation in the media. In relating to architectural space, as well as the strategies for their representation in the media, Nimmerfall uses interiors from the hit TV series C.S.I. (Crime Scene Investigation), in three separate versions: Las Vegas, Miami and New York. As described through the title, each exhibition is connected to the description of the city being used as the background of a story, a perfect example of a “cinematic map”; although it is related to a real city and takes advantage of its cinematic setting, it is hardly ever filmed on location, with most scenes shot in studio locations or substituted by Los Angeles field locations. In this way, typical clichéd and easily recognizable views of a specific city are created- by the use of second unit photography (stock footage)- and are then edited into the film/show in order to convince/deceive the viewer into assigning it geographically to a particular location.

With these investigations into space and location Karina Nimmerfall is especially interested in the presentation of interiors and their assignment. For the third (and last) part of the project- Second Unit : New York- she researched one of NYC’s most clichéd and typical spaces: a narrow dark hallway and the view into a small and dark apartment. By extracting single views from different television camera angles of the interior and combining them into two new space-image projections she has created a new simulated experience of the interior. In this way a new timeline has been formulated, one disturbing the illusion of the real; the actors and certain details are now digitally erased, overlayed instead with the computer generated movements of a flickering neon light, or a rotating fan. The combination of these new appropriated and edited video projections within a built installation environment forms an interface which is used to shift one’s levels of perception, creating new “space time situations”. Now a former television depiction has been turned in an active space, experienced not only by viewing, but by walking and participating in a space.

Space 2: Cinematic Maps

Photo-Text Series, 2005-2006 Supplementary to the installation in the main space, the photo-text series “cinematic maps” shows further investigations on this topic: The project depicts researched images based on the hit TV drama “Law and Order”, a show which formally uses aspects of “Cinema Vérité” for a documentary style. To support this concept the show is actually shot with New York locations and has precise addresses (instead of establishing shots) edited into the plot. Starting from these addresses, and their appearance on the TV screen, the photo-series documents their actual real locations (mostly “in-between” or “non spaces” – like missing houses, intersections, parking lots) using the formal aesthetics of an establishing shot. In combination with the text (the addresses – “titlecards” – as they appear on the show) the project exists as a form of documentary, not one whose aim is to portray a supposed “truth” in reality, but instead a work that intends to highlight the possibilities of a fictional space, an area that each day is claimed to be almost more real than reality itself.

Karina Nimmerfall (Austrian, b. 1971 in Deggendorf/Germany) attended the Universitiy of Vienna, Austria and the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, Germany. She received a MAK Schindler Grant at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (2002); a Foreign Scholarship of the Federal Chancellery Austria for Chicago (2003); and a Talent Prize for Fine Arts of Upper Austria (2005). Previous Exhibitions include New Talents 2005 – Art Cologne (Germany); Galerie Grita Insam (Vienna/Austria); 8th Havana Biennale (Cuba); Landesgalerie am Oberösterreichischen Landesmuseum (Linz/Austria); MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles); Bucket Rider Gallery (Chicago); Museum Wiesbaden (Germany).

Karina Nimmerfall
Double Location