Ariadne's Thread

According to French philosopher Gaston Bachelard the house is a body of images, which gives the illusion of stability. In Andre Breton’s little-known poem ‘La Maison d’Yves’ (1948) the attic of the house is entered at night by lantern-light in an attempt to penetrate and make transparent the domain of the unknown dark. Ariadne’s Thread is underpinned with the ideas of Bachelard and Breton that the attic appears in our dreams as an unconscious latent image. Klenz’ piece describes the architecture of the house in relation to the ‘architecture of the psyche’ and presents the attic as non-functional, non-fixed but rather a dwelling of elusive and oneiric quality.

The images being directly printed on aluminium, a material that is commonly used to mount the photographic image onto, explores the materiality of photography itself.

The piece, comprising of 6 individual panels, has no fixed position. Each time the work is installed the arrangement of the individual images can be changed by the curator, highlighting Klenz’ interest in imagery’s fugitive status.

At the core of Ariadne’s Thread lies an insistence on the inherent instability of the image as a ‘fixed’ representation, exploring Kaja Silvermann’s ideas that a photograph can remain active after it has been technically finished describing her term ‘innate anima’.