Natasha Johns-Messenger’s work is a complex process of imitation, illusion and trickery activated by architectural interventions and optical physics, extended also to photography, digital painting and sculpture. In this site specific exhibition she explores the interaction of space, light and volume, dissolving the relationship between the viewer and the work of art into a renewed shared space. It comprises a number of architectural interventions, including a large walk through hall of mirrors as well as a series of site photographs and a site film.
Using a complex system of optical physics, comprising devices such as periscopic mirrors, live video projections, architectural mimicry, and site determined photography, Johns Messenger sets up disorienting pictorial planes in real space. Participant viewers do not always know what is real and what is virtual in their immediate space or view. As art critic Robert Nelson wrote, in such spaces we may experience picture spaces of an imponderable nature, unfathomable and eerie.
