‘Zee[Range]’ plays with lights, colors and minds

Experiencing Kurt Hentschlager’s ‘Zee[Range]’ exhibit is like walking into a science-fiction… Experiencing Kurt Hentschlager’s ‘Zee[Range]’ exhibit is like walking into a science-fiction movie. There’s a room filled with white fog. Pulse lights fade in and out. Strobe lights flash. There are psychedelic, three-dimensional patterns that exist only in your mind. The fog is disorienting, and it’s difficult to find the way out. This is what it’s like to experience ‘Zee,’ part of ‘Zee[Range],’ an installation by New York-based Austrian artist Kurt Hentschlager. Hentschlager is known for creating technologically complex environments that stimulate the senses at Wood Street Galleries Downtown. He divides this installation into the two different rooms of ‘Zee and Range,’ which Hentschlager explained exist as opposites. In ‘Zee,’ — a made-up word — the experience is about the interaction between your senses and the space, which is more fleeting and ambiguous. In ‘Range,’ the experience is about the play of light within the space, which is more concrete. Hentschlager explained that we often don’t even think about how we rely on our primary senses to operate within our environments, especially in emergency moments.’ In ‘Zee[Range],’ these internal processes are visualized and made conscious. ‘Range’ is a cave-like environment that uses different amounts of light to alternately illuminate an empty room and then throw it into darkness.’ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ These fluctuating light patterns reveal new spaces and corners in the room and also create a changing atmosphere to which the senses must continually readjust. In ‘Zee,’ several stroboscopes flick on and off at different frequencies, creating three-dimensional interference patterns within the white fog, explained Hentschlager. According to Hentschlager, these three-dimensional images that your mind sees cannot be documented, as they appear two-dimensional when captured by a camera. It’s an experiential piece,’ said Hentschlager. He explained that ‘Zee’ can’t be understood ‘unless you see it and hear it.’ ‘ ‘The piece cannot be documented and can’t quite be translated, which I think is what I like about it,’ he said. An assistant at the gallery and recent Pitt graduate, Ian Brill, navigated the installation hundreds of times and said that the experience only got more exciting and that he would sometimes still get lost in the fog. Brill said that for him, the experience of ‘Zee[Range]’ and its three-dimensional patterns reveals a compromise between its pure bombardment of the senses and what the senses can actually interpret. Brill thinks of ‘Zee[Range]’ as ‘white noise modulated by the ocean,’ and he explained that its ambiguous environment can feel like both the womb and a nightmare. The ambiguous environments of the exhibit, the empty room and the white fog create canvases onto which each person can project his own unique experience of the stimuli in ‘Zee[Range].’ Hentschlager said that experiencing ‘Zee’ is not that different from being outside in thick winter fog or in a cloud of smoke. He is interested in how increased technological developments affect our abilities to see and process the world around us. ”Zee’ is an environment that creates exaggerations of what we used to call nature,’ said Hentschlager. ‘Fog, and everything you see in ‘Zee,’ is out there in nature. Fog is existing, and flashes are existing … We can exaggerate and we can recombine. This is a culture of amplification.’ Hentschlager creates these environments that consume the body and stimulate sensory perception because for him, art is about the experience. ‘I do not believe in concept art that mostly addresses the cerebral part of you,’ said Hentschlager. ‘I’m very excited by work that addresses my entire person, both my left and my right hemisphere, and I like to do the same in my work.’ Although ‘Range’ remains open, ‘Zee’ recently had to be dismantled before the end of the installation because of technical issues, according to Hentschlager and signs posted around the gallery.