The perceptual affect of the materials left me dwelling upon my own reading of the work. The frosty mutant ornamentation loitering between the screens was not glass, nor ice, but actually a plastic (polyurethene I think) used to to fill moldings taken from such whimsically domestic assemblages. Nonetheless, I still fell for it's disguise; in a darkened room with bass filling the air I didn't want to breath on the shapes for fear of melting them. I also grew acutely aware of how Hans Bergs music was 'interacting' with the space and the objects in such space. The bass felt worrying, as if a delicate frosted thimblesque 'thing' may trip under it's weight and damage it's beautiful self. The high pitched 'tinks' and 'chinks' pierced the projector lit room with tenacity and my mind wandered onto rather geeky trains of thought concerning the resonance of such sounds within the glassy tabletop forests. I left with questioning how much of the experience was mediated by my own projection of the the material and spacial properties around me, to what degree did the fantasy of glass, ice, air and water shape my experience of the work?
Nathalie Djurberg's films were magical and enthralling, the horrific, dark fables of "vulnerability, desire and suffering" reflected, in an almost off camber mode of conceptual convergence: the brutal materiality of nature. Anthropocentric situations were subverted and negated through plays of primal desires, depictions of harrowing survival instincts and fleshed out enquiries of prey-predator dynamics.
The juxtaposition of knowing (or loaded) sensory mediators (the dark space, the glassy objects, the ice cavern sounds etc) and the gory claymotion explorations of life and materiality at it's most natural, brutal and base - essentially a de-anthropothizing of the viewers materiality concepts - created a profound tension.
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