Building Space

March 18, 2016 from 6 - 8 PM.

UNIX Gallery is pleased to present Building Space, a group exhibition of photographic works from a trio of international contemporary artists: John Messinger, Christian Voigt, and Sabine Pigalle. On view through the end of the 2016 FotoFest Biennial, Building Space opens with a public reception for the artists on March 18, 2016 from 6 - 8 PM. An artist Q&A will be held on March 17, 2016, from 6 - 8 PM.

From a broad spectrum of artistic approaches, this trio incorporates a variety of photographic and digital processes to produce images that invite the viewer into a spacial experience of rich dimension and depth via the auspices of the photographic plane. Immersing the viewers in monolithic spaces, the trio examines the construction of space, narrative, light, and grandiosity via photography. 

American photographer John Messinger explores the proliferation and ubiquity of photography by combining hundreds of images into a single visual photographic tapestry. Mesmerizing, luminous, and atmospheric, these tapestries amass and consider the effects of subtle tonal variations that render a grand photographic plane. German photographer Christian Voigt details impressions of extraordinary buildings and architecture. Sharp, bold, and large-scale, Voigt’s photographs deliver tenor and extraordinary sense of grandeur via his photography. French photographer Sabine Pigalle imagines contemporary mythologies by juxtaposing archetypical references with history, religion, and symbols. Reinterpreting myths, Pigalle is able to weave personal narratives and explorations of archetypes and portraiture by assembling photography. 

John Messinger combines elements of photography and tapestry to create large-scale, 3-dimensional mixed media artworks. His body of work consists of thousands of individual 3.25” x 4.25” instant photographs assembled together to create photographic tapestries that examine the proliferation and ubiquity of the photograph in the digital age. Inspired by the notions of singularity and time, Messinger combines hundreds of varying images and transforms them into a single experience. His work fuses indexical and abstract imagery to question the notion of photography, photographer, and subject. 

Christian Voigt is known for his impressive images created using large-format cameras. Voigt has photographed great libraries, museums, landscapes and temples. Through his lens, Voigt captured mankind’s extraordinary buildings and architecture - offering an illuminated tenor, delivering with his photography an inescapable sense of history and verve. “The intensity of the image, or of what one perceives as being alienated, is the result of Christian Voigt’s camera technique,” explains art critic, Simone Simon, of Voigt’s work, finding “his own form and his unique style by experimenting with the proven technique of multiple exposures, first practiced in the 1930s, in which several pictures of the same image are taken on top of each other... And so what we see is an unreal reality.

Sabine Pigalle concentrates on the reinterpretation of myths. Religious history, mythology, European master painters and  mannerism provide both the varied sources of her inspiration and the raw materials for her artistic explorations. Pigalle produces hybrid photographs in different series, the majority of them dedicated to the art of portraiture, that combine contemporary visual effects with references to ancient art and archetypes.  

John Messinger

Christian Voigt

Sabine Pigalle