The title FAUX TERRAIN subsumes various interrelated but nevertheless discrete artistic works by Claudia Larcher. Through the use of abstraction, exaggeration and decontextualization, she presents habitats, architectural landscapes and natural formations as utopian expanses and dystopian scenarios. The works, which due to their perplexing wealth of detail initially seem to be realistic representations of actual facts and circumstances on the ground, are actually complex, multi-layered artistic constructions that dissolve the boundary between reality and fiction.
With an abstract cartography as her guide for this exhibition, Claudia Larcher has designed a fragmented landscape that crisscrosses the borders of its scientific, geographic and geological realms. For the series NIDA (2015/2016), she examined the Lithuanian peninsula Neringa and explores the border between Europe and Russia . She analysed forms of natural landscapes and organisms for Artefakte (2016).
For the video Installation In Between the Ocean (2014), she interwove images of interior spaces in Tokyo with wide-angle footage shot in the disaster zones around Fukushima and Tohoku, in order to reflect the impact of energy policy on the natural environment and the cityscape. People are few and far between in her work, and even when they do show up it is only in the form of the traces they have left behind.
In the video Self (2015), Larcher explores human skin in close-up shots. This surface, seemingly so familiar with all its details and characteristics, successively mutates into a surreal landscape. In a slow tracking shot, the interior and exterior of the human body morph into a fictitious space, a faux terrain into which spectators suddenly find themselves projected.
