private view: 6 - 8 pm Saturday 04 September 2004

Maureen Paley Interim Art is pleased to present a solo show of works by Saskia Olde Wolbers.“The videos of Saskia Olde Wolbers exist in a dimension somewhere between virtual reality and organic imagination. All models and sets for her floaty scenes of impossible space, have been meticulously assembled by hand; from modern versions of baroque architecture to submerged worlds evoking science fiction to visions of total abstraction. These are mental settings, where time seems suspended, where indeterminate fluids flow slowly and continuously, and space itself is in constant flux. These images are accompanied by an off-screen voice relating stories of disillusionment, sadness and even tragedy, often loosely based on stories gathered from the daily papers, TV news, and conversations randomly overheard. While the narration unfolds against the landscapes, a seductive contrast is created between the futurist-like abstraction of the backdrops shifting ever so slightly with the dreamy and poignant sentiment of the stories.” Luca Cerizza, Artforum website, 2003

“’Here I am … lying next to my lover Jean, in intensive care’, begins the absent minded, anaesthetized voice of an unseen female narrator in the video installation Placebo (2002). The camera pans around a liquid hospital interior. The narrator and her lover have been in a car crash engineered by Jean, and in waking, she comes to the realisation that her lover is only the façade of a man. His life as a respected doctor and married family man is an elaborate fiction. As the woman tells her story, an amorphous, white fluid slowly oozes horizontally across the screen (actually, paint made to flow through small wire constructions), an evocation of the woman’s mental state as she slips in and out of consciousness as well as of the “white shiny veins” of the hospital’s halls and corridors.”

In Day-Glo (1999) Luis Zarzuela, an Andalusian market gardener, attempts to make money by creating a virtual reality theme park in the middle of Andalucia. Although the scheme turns out to be successful, he discovers that in the course of this development, his wife has been committing adultery – with a younger version of himself.

Recent solo exhibitions include The Baloize Prize 2003 in Ghent, Belgium and Now that part of me has become fiction at the Kunsthalle St Gallen, Switzerland and Museum Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands. Her work is collected widely, both in the UK and abroad. She was the recipient of the Baloize Prize, Art Basel 2003 and the Beck’s Futures award, London 2004.