you’ve red between the lines

A multi media installation by Renate Aller
’The Color of Love, Warmth, Passion, Seduction.
The Color of Blood, Heat, Envy, Pain and War’
2 videos, looped
Limited edition C-Prints
40 x 60 edition 5
28 x 40 edition 10

Initial photo installation in collaboration with curator Vittoria Ciolini, Dryphoto Arte Contemporanea, and Comune di Prato Assessorato alla Cultura
 Officina Giovani TraArt Regione Toscana, Italy.

Accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Caroline Smith.

(excerpt from audio of the video projection that follows the viewer as walking around the exhibition space)

We perceive the color red in different ways. For many New Yorkers these days red means “high alert”. Terror creates anxieties that suspend reality and blur our vision and judgment. We stop trusting our perceptions and move into a simulated hyper-reality created by mass media. I am playing off this notion with my work and consciously put the viewer into a position where s/he has to interpret the duplicity of their meanings. For example, do we perceive the young woman in one of the photos as dead, or is what we see as blood just the spilled wine, and she is sleeping peacefully? The viewer gets to decide weather to see sensuality, lust or violence in one and the same image. The work, represented by nine large color photos and two videos is creating a discourse about the multiplicity of our audio/visual conceptions, using the color red as a metaphor.

The British Scientist and Astrologist David McCann writes : “As Goethe claimed… colour perception is a matter for the mind, not the eye…Colours, unlike other symbols, speak directly to our perception and so tend to have similar associations in different cultures. “

The 6’x3’images laminated on to ‘cold’ metal sheets, suspended from the ceiling by meat hooks have previously shown in the cool room of a deserted slaughter house , now art centre, with it’s cold, blue tiles in Prato / Italy. The sound of the simultaneously showing of videos, one on a monitor in the corner of the main room and the other as a projection in the adjacent darkened space softly seduces the viewer to experience the sensuality as well as the raw emotions of the works. Additional elements of the piece include a performance with a ‘red’ dinner.