Minnie Weisz : I am a camera

Minnie has turned to some of the oldest, most rudimentary optical technology. Her latest show features photographs of rooms in the now empty 1854 Great Northern Hotel in London, and in most of the images she has turned the spaces into giant pinhole cameras.

The technique is simple. "You just black out the windows with paper or whatever, and make a pinhole. And then you're inside a camera, with the image of the outside projected in it. You can see people walking over the ceiling. It's quite eerie."

One of the photographs, "Room 418", is particularly disconcerting: you don't immediately notice that it is upside-down because, in this state, the projected image appears the right way up. The flat roofs of what look like railway sheds hover over the floor like a daylight hologram, and a wire coathanger rises, from a hook, like a cheap aerial.



Minnie Weisz approaches her subjects, her site-specific works as an artist, as one might approach an archeological dig. She unearths historical references to the buildings she chooses to inhabit, cataloguing these spaces in the context of history, myth and local lore. Weisz uses photography, projections and found material to explore the unseen narratives of the building, engaging with the present, past, real and imagined. Weisz’s application of pinhole technique, allows the building to become an eye, viewing an everchanging outside world which is captured and recorded by the interior and in turn awakening memories and stimulating dreams. A dialogue unfolds between Weisz’s response to the subject and the subject’s response to its surroundings. These processes of reflection and projection, in Weisz's images raise questions about the identity of space, and of real and imagined interior worlds.

Weisz’s work engages the organic haphazardness of London’s architecture, re-mapping memory within the cityscape, offering its secrets to us as we navigate through dreamscapes layered with history and fantasy. Time, memory and place in flux: luminous artefacts, gestures to past and present. Weisz’s rooms and buildings watch each other , in silent witness and look back at us.

(above information taken from other websites)

I like this art because as the weather and time of day changes outside, so does the art. It's such a simple traditional method with eerie results! Seeing this makes me want to have a go... so watch this space!!!