Katleen Vinck at Base-Alpha

Artist: Katleen Vinck

Exhibition title: Fractal

Venue: Base-Alpha, Antwerp, Belgium

Date: October 22 – December 3, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Base-Alpha, Antwerp

Katleen Vinck (B,°1976) is attracted towards natural phenomena in our landscape. Cliffs, rocks, caves …. Fascinated by how man reduced this natural phenomena through impersonations into artificial constructions, Vinck is searching for a way to fathon these archetypes though staging and archiving. Katleen Vinck imitates human impersonations and thus her objects are forming a personal typology. Aspects of her background, stage design, art and architecture, blend themself into hybrid forms and shapes.

In her third solo exhibition at Base Alpha Gallery, Katleen Vinck is approaching hill and crater. These phenomena serve as rest space; pieces of indefinite no man’s land. One occurring in an upworth force, the other shows the remnants of an impact.

The meticulous and robust scale models are showing the urge and desire of man to usurp natural phenomena, and the urge to mold the landscape into his culture. Caves initially were natural shelters, and man transformed it into what we know today as a bunker. Rational, fake architecture, neatly integrated in the landscape. Then the landscape undergoes a transition when nature inexorably is infiltrating the architecture. Therafter, architecture and man are subsequently taking over nature again. A constant and consistent interaction that continuously enforces the transformation and the way our landscape is shaped. The work of Katleen Vinck can be situated on this ridge.

Octagonal shapes and craters are recuring forms throughout the exhibition. Even when the images are to be interpretated as natural phenomena, they are also clear references to architecture. Katleen Vinck does not sends the viewer into a unilateral direction, but constructs a misleading tension between what is natural and what is staged. Several layers of time, and the ambiguity of nature and culture, are visible.

The scenography functions as like a map for the spectator to have a detailed look at geographical referents in Vinck’s creations. A fractal is consequent result of often recurring patterns of processes. While they seemingly are leaning towards their original, they each still host a new reality.

Vinck’s hybrid and diverse work is a mimesis of realities from where new meanings and associates arise.

– Elea Winter