HOUSTON, SIE HABEN EIN PROBLEM! 2022

Something new usually represents a refutation of the just-now-past. Richard Hoeck deals with the “just past”, questioning the ideas that have shaped our recent history. Due to the increasing shift of our everyday life into digital spaces, our perception of bodies, images, materials and surfaces is constantly shifting. Within this fluid relationship of objects and visual representation, mannequins occupy a borderline area of percep- tion between materiality, pretence and artifice. The sculptures were made in 2020, by disassembling damaged mannequins, which were then put back together from the debris; a production process of “recut” mannequins in which one figure emerges from the remains of many. In the case of “Paradigmatic Pose of the Arc the Cercle”, the colour of the figures becomes part of their projected image. Wrapped in radiant green – the same hue used to make backgrounds and objects digitally interchangeable in a Greenbox – they take on the character of digital animations; another level of fiction added to the inanimate yet lifelike figures.