Gabriel Lester
TWIRL
Opening: September 20, 2013 (permanent commission)
Public Art Agency Sweden
Student House, Stockholm University
Universitetsvägen 2 B, Stockholm
Sweden
Hours: Monday–Thursday 8am–6pm; Friday 8am–4pm
A vast number of skattered, twirling A4 sheets meet visitors in the entrance of the newly built Student House at Stockholm University. Like a magic illusion, the white papers hover upwards in an elegant, choreographic gesture. Here, time stands still in a frozen moment.
Gabriel Lester’s site-specific work TWIRL flows throughout the building, as though the sheets had been scattered by a burst of air. This scene was inspired by a famous woodcut by the Japanese artist Hokusai (1760–1849).
Much like a freeze-frame, a technique used in cinema and video art—a field from which Gabriel Lester often draws his inspiration—TWIRL portrays a sudden movement, a dramatic scene, fixed in motion. The frozen gesture also generates another movement, captured within the composition, which changes constantly as the viewer moves around the sculpture. An encounter, a collision, occurs between two temporal movements, the eternal and the present.
The suspended sculpture is made of individually shaped handmade sheets that are hung like a gigantic chandelier, with its characteristic materials and details. For a frozen moment, the blank, white A4 sheets are hovering, as if suggesting that a sudden gust of wind, a moment of change and clarity, can reveal that everything is possible and all is yet to be determined.
Gabriel Lester was born in Amsterdam in 1972 and has been producing works since the mid-1990s that are influenced by cinematography and architecture, and mediate the perception of the world that is constantly re-shaped by new technology and mass media.
Gabriel Lester has exhibited extensively at major institutions and biennials, most recently with two projects included in dOCUMENTA (13), 2012 and in the Lithuanian Pavilions exhibition oO at the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013, winning special mentions for National Participations.
