20 march 2009 – 02 May 2009

There is a suggestion of remoteness and intimacy in Ellen Augustynen's  work, in its exploration of themes related to perception, experience and  consciousness.
This can be seen in a video that more or less sets the tone to  L'attente, her new exhibition at Dagmar De Pooter Gallery. We are  presented with a scene of a room, recorded off the floor at slightly 
higher than foot-level, and can hear the sound of someone walking. Every  so often the artist's shoes can be seen briefly as she passes in front  of the camera. This strategy begins to reveal the conceptual  underpinnings to Augustynen's project, based, as it is, on probing,  searching and reworking.  This is not a portrait of the artist, but of  what she is doing: traversing not only her studio, but certain states of  mind.
 A selection of images, taken from a series of small, glass-mounted  photos depicting sections of the artist's body, reduces this theme into  fragmentary depictions of physicality. We do not see the artist's face  there is no eye contact, no personal connection. The physical in  search of the conceptual: the material moves the mind.
 Complimenting this reduction to basic components is a series of small,  black, wall-mounted sculptures of open, box-like forms. Pared down and deceptively simple, though not quite in a minimalist sense -- these  objects do not represent themselves -- these too refer to states of mind.
Motion and immobility, walking and waiting, physical and conceptual, Augustynen's work is neither orderly nor chaotic, although it incorporates aspects of both. There is a certain emptiness to these  works. Not empty as in "nothing," but as in void/non-void. That zone  where one is absorbed in one's own mind, banal but utterly fascinating.
Another set of objects in L'attente are two large, stainless-steel frames. Paradoxical in themselves, Augustynen describes these frames as  "controversial in their nothingness." Here too we are presented with work that is detached though not withdrawn, a simultaneously conceptual  and telluric reference.
There is an elusive quality to Augustynen's work, reducing, as it does, the space between the material and the immaterial. She says she is "not  satisfied with connections to any particular story," regarding her work  instead as a "non-story." We are not meant to project ideas into these  works, nor are we meant to contemplate the space between them. Yet there  do seem to be points of intersection between the objects presented here, and though there appear to be lines that connect these works to each other, we are not encouraged to read between them.


 Michael Laird
 Antwerp, 2009