Uta Koegelsberger
Cafe Gallery Projects London (September 3 to September 28), Imperial College London
(September 18 to October 26)
'The corridor of uncertainty' was the wonderfully suggestive phrase that the former cricketer and commentator Geoff Boycott coined to describe the danger zone slightly outside the off stump where a batsman doesn't know whether or not he is safe to leave the ball alone. It would suit Uta Koegelsberger's large-scale landscape photographs. Why? Because, at once both familiar and strange, these haunting, seductive images seem to take us into a realm of productive anxiety.
The artist's approach is to find unlikely colours in her subjects by working at night and using long exposures and Hollywood-style artificial lights (car headlights and hand-held torches). This often gives her images the look of a late night horror movie. Phosphorescent-looking tree trunks punctuating the night, pools of acid-coloured heather caught in the headlights, the moon-like surface of an empty beach in the dark: they seem like film stills, albeit from a film whose narrative we can never quite figure out. And this is true even where the light is not obviously night-time: in Reservoir, for instance, where the milky blues of Kielder Reservoir in Northumberland look as though they have been photographed in the weird light of the land of the midnight sun.
Is this Mulder and Scully spookiness? Not quite. Michel Foucault's notion of heterotopia is nearer the mark. For what Koegelsberger's strangely illuminated images seem to provide is a kind of skewed dream-like version of the world we inhabit, one that is at once perfectly recognisable and at the same time oddly significant-seeming, where prosaic things like, say, bunkers on a golf course near Berwick or tracks in the sand at Whitley Bay appear full of possibility. Take an image of a ruined pill box on the shore near Hartlepool, for example. In other hands, those of the photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen in her recent show at Baltic for instance, this dour utilitarian object would no doubt seem like an impressive monument to something: a cue for solemn thoughts and sad regret. In Koegelsberger's work, however, it is offered as a strange lump so gnarled by the elements that it almost seems to have lost whatever human overtones it may ever have possessed and to be turning instead into a kind of North Sea version ofAyres Rock.
Koegelsberger's images are also heterotopian in the theatrical way that they juxtapose different, incompatible worlds in such a manner that the scene as a whole seems convincing. Thus, for instance, an image of a solitary caravan standing alone in the pitch-black darkness of the English countryside has two different artificially-lit spaces, the outside of the caravan and its barely discernible domestic interior, that are both mysteriously visible at the same time. And similarly, an image of a line of broken driftwood on the shore of a Vermont lake at night presents the driftwood in the foreground so bright and sharp that it seems like the apron of a brilliantly illuminated stage quite distinct from the rich, dark blues of the water and sky beyond.
This particular work, incidentally, has definite overtones of Caspar David Friedrich's famous painting of a monk by the sea contemplating the otherness of nature. However, it should be noted that thanks to the theatrical quality that I am referring to there is no sense of it as an exercise in the sublime. On the contrary, its effect is to make the viewer feel implicated in the scene.
So one might say Koegelsberger's work adds up to a quirky, refreshingly un-English kind of landscape, one that reveals the inherent strangeness of whatever the chosen motif happens to be: trees drowning in a Vermont lake, the wind-blown trees and heather of a Northumbrian moor, a spaceship-like control tower-cum-valve in the middle of Kielder Reservoir or a hut beside the causeway between Holy Island and the mainland. But actually I think it is altogether more interesting than that. Koegelsberger's work offers an alternative to our so-called normal world that effectively throws the very notion of normality into question. In other words, to borrow again from Foucault, it is landscape as 'counter-site'.
Paul Usherwood teaches art history at Northumbria University