Wolfgang Weileder: Meridiano

The works of Wolfgang Weileder are investigations into the relationship between time and space, into the interconnection between permanence and transience, and how these can be explored to probe our knowledge of built and natural landscapes. Meridiano includes selected large format photographic prints from the Seascapes series. In this show, various seascapes from around Europe – North Sea, Adriatic Sea, Ligurian Sea, Irish Sea, Skagerrak, Ijsselmeer – recording either sunrise or sunset.

The images appear both familiar and at the same time strangely unsettling: their chronological development identifies neither with the instant of photography nor with the flow of movies, but nevertheless they do not seem foreign to us. Seascapes are combined into a ‘mosaic’, representing a boundless temporal sequence of nearly imperceptible transformations.

Weileder employs digital technology to achieve this result, using a fixed camera capturing thousands of shots of the same scene over the course of several hours at intervals of just a few seconds. Ad hoc software then selects a vertical strip, one pixel wide, at the same point in every captured image and combines these segments in a chronological succession from left to right to compose the final image.

The observer perceives recognizable, and normally soothing, natural scenes where the coexistence of continuities and discontinuities in space and time generates a feeling of disorientation, ambiguity and emotional perturbation while his mind is stimulated to seek answers regarding the technique and how the agency of the author integrates with the element of chance in the scene unfolding before the camera lens.