Heike Baranowsky: American Skies

G Fine Art is pleased to present an exhibition titled American Skies by Heike Baranowsky. The show opens on Saturday, January 28 and continues through March 11, 2006

Baranowsky lives and works in Berlin and part time in Bergen, Norway. The five videos that complete this series were shot in the US and Mexico between 2002-2005 and are seen here for the first time in their entirety.

The American Landscape is a singular, seemingly wide open and free space: this is the premise were Baranowsky began and where the viewer enters. The series starts with Blown in the Wind, 2002. In this video we see a tumbleweed cross the desert landscape. Shape Shifter, also 2002 shows a Zeppelin pivoting slowing on it¹s axis tracing a lazy figure eight in the sky. Ballet, 2002 is taken in the Illinois landscape. In it a dark mass rises up, it is a flock of starlings that swoops off screen and doubles back reappearing from the other corner. Out of the Blue was shot in the landscape near Joshua Tree and show the trail left behind by a plane crisscrossing the sky. Mariposa, 2005 is the quiet document of the Monarch butterflies migration between North America and Mexico.

Four photographs hanging at the gallery entrance, however, pin down the images both geographically and politically and adds an unexpected dimension to the series. The pictures are press images of American military activity or natural phenomenon against a backdrop of industry. These suggest that the American skies are the site for political activity, The Zeppelin's movement hints at surveillance, the movement of the starlings mass hysteria and the Out of the Blue video an animation layered on an American landscape is the flight patterns of American military planes over Afghanistan.

Baranowsky alters the speed of the videos, making us focus on the image's form and compositional elements. By projecting the videos in different formats and sizes, Baranowsky structures an exercise for the viewer that plays with the architectural space and time. The videos lengthen, condense, mirror and dissect the successions of time and spacial relationships.

Heike Baranowsky studied at the Akademie del fur bildenden Kunste in Munich, at the Hochschule for bildenden Kunste in Hamburg as well as the Royal College of Art in London. She has show widely including the following venues Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, Entwistle, London, Singapore Museum, Singapore, Paco des Artes, San Paolo, Kunste Werke, Berlin, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Serpentine Gallery, London, The Museum for Contemporary Photography, Chicago, PS 1, New York, MOMA, New York, and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

Heike Baranowsky
American Skies