Eva Weinmayr

Hear the Tiny Auto Horns when they Tiny Blow
30th September - 31 October 2004

t1+ 2 Artspace is happy to host Eva Weinmayr's Hear the Tiny Auto Horns when they Tiny Blow, a work occupying three storeys of a single interior wall of the building in which the art space resides. Utilising a stylised, scaled-up image of flowers Weinmayr has produced an interior "facade" that intimately aligns itself with the building's architectural structure. Reminiscent of an exaggerated wallpaper pattern, this vast work reconfigures and reenergises a found architectural space. Scale and proportion are distorted by the use of these over-sized flowers and questions of distance and closeness become paramount as the viewer attempts to address the appearance or disappearance of the piece as a whole. Though only part of the actual work is visible one is asked to mentally connect these areas with sections of the space not normally open to public view.

Weinmayr has borrowed her title from a line in a song by Frank Zappa, an expression hinting at the wall painting's Gulliver-like scale-shifting effects. Zappa's words are also used to allude to the penetration into the gallery space of the frenetic sounds produced by the extensive building work being carried out in London's financial district, at the centre of which t1+2 Artspace is located. Such invasive ambient noises, notably from the huge building site adjacent to the gallery but also coming from similar developments sited some distance away, foreground the increasing interpenetration of public and private space.

This theme is also embodied by "Kustom City", a six-part series of photographs showing the artist disrupting the language, meaning and design of the city's corporate signage, which today pervades public space at an ever-increasing rate.

The third body of works in the exhibition pertain to information and daily news. These pieces take the form of a number of radically altered newspaper pages. As with Weinmayr's found roadsigns, which have been covered by the artist with high-tech car laquer, the coated pages of the papers become opalescent lakes, distorting, iridescent mirrors whose effects vary considerably in relation to the viewer's physical relation to them.

Eva Weinmayr most recently exhibited in Flexibilitat at the Kunstverein in Wolfsburg, Germany, and has a solo show at Minisalon, Munich, Germany, in October 2004. She is currently working on a publication with Book Works, London, to be published in spring 2005.