Jonas Vansteenkiste

"I am imposing me on you and you are on me"

Installation 2016

 wood, light.  circa 500x500x245

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We are facing an installation with open and closed framework. The form has an abstract feel to it, but has a familary ring to it. The hight and material and the way it is constructed reminds us how rooms in a house are made.
If we look closer we can depict two room like structures within the whole.Lets call these rooms A and B, they are two places that in  physical reality never will be together.

They seem to interlock and form this image. the open structure is like a skeleton of the room or space dipected. Where the structures overlap, the framework is boarded up and closed  of for us: the viewers. It conveys the impression to be excluded from the content of the work.

The titel "I am imposing me on you and you are on me" makes a clear suggestion that the content of this work is about two persons: 'You' and 'I'. Using the terms You and I makes a clear message that this structure has a more intimate nature or even private content.

 

 

Lets call one room 'I' and the other "You" and these two structures can be seen as a venndiagram.

A venndiagram (also called a set diagram or logic diagram) is a diagram that shows all possible logical relations between a finite collection of different sets.

Venn diagrams were conceived around 1880 by John Venn. They are used to teach elementary set theory, as well as illustrate simple set relationships in probability, logic, statistics, linguistics and computer science.

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In the case of the work "I am imposing me on you and you are on me" the work is like a analyse or diagram of a relationschip between two spaces linked to the meaning of you and I. We can also conclude that both sides have an other basic form and that these space never quite merge. Both of the rooms remaine uniek but also have a shared space a sort of nucleus.

This shared space is symbolic reference to the intimate space, "the holding environment" a concept referred to by Donald Winnicott (a 20th century pediatrician and psychoanalyst who studied child development. )
It is clear that this work started from a personal intimate perspective, the I and the You and that the shape of the rooms have there roots in the personal past of the artist and his partner but this work transcends the personal story of the maker and becomes a diagram that embodies all human relationships.

For M.