Time Spaces

At first glance, Michael Michlmayr’s works, in which he addresses his immediate urban environment, seem to be skillful snapshot photography—only when the visitor takes time to examine the spaces represented in them closely does he begin to notice that a constructivist game with reality is being played here. Everyday scenarios, sequentially photographed from the same position, are woven into single-image time-space-continuums. Incidents, activities, architecture, condensed from sequences of individual

images via digital processing into panoramic pictures, are transformed into sequences multiplying an identical perspective in which a scenic action takes place. The resulting montages radiate their own peculiar form of visual poetry, movements that seem frozen produce aesthetic and virtually graphical subjects. As the viewer continues to engage these works of art, they disclose their critical substance: they are a slap in the face of our visually oriented (media) world in which it is not the narrative report but the photograph that is regarded as proof of an objective reality! Moreover, the uniformity of presentation and the stylistic choice of repetition serve to stage for us an absurd theater of the everyday, illustrating a tension that defines life today: that between individuality and conformity—insistently and consistently striving for uniqueness, we appear ever more uniform. Will we escape the human condition by rushing through space and time?

Karin Seidner

ZeitRäume inszenieren und erinnern.
Imaginäre Zufallsmomente bei Michael Michlmayr

von Claudia Marion Stemberger (german)