Ursula Mayer Zeitkristalle / The Crystals of Time

The exhibition The Crystals of Time offers a concentrated insight into Ursula Mayer’s current film work. Mayer’s most recent film The Crystal Gaze (2007) is presented here for the first time. The trilogy Portland Place 33, Keeling House and Villa Mairea (2005÷06) can be seen in a thematic conjunction with this most recent work.

In the three short works of the trilogy Ursula Mayer exhibits the basic elements of the filmic: the setting, the protagonist, the camera movement. The selected locations are charged with historical, social and ideological facts and references: a Victorian townhouse, a residential tower in London from the 1950s, a modernist private villa in Finland. Complex interactions evolve here between a woman, the spaces and the camera. No stringent narrative results from the fragmented actions, yet the viewers are drawn into a fascinating network of fictions, looks, gestures, forms and the suggestive soundtrack in an ellipsis of time.

In The Crystal Gaze, shot in the art deco rooms of Eltham Palace in London, Mayer works with a script for the first time. Narrative and visual parallels are drawn to the tradition of the classical Hollywood film, and a cinematic role play of power relations between actresses is mirrored and framed by the opulent elegance of the historical setting.

Ursula Mayer, born 1970 in Upper Austria. Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, at the Royal College of Art and at Goldsmith College in London. International exhibitions since 1996. Lives and works in London.

For their generous support for the realization of The Crystal Gaze the artist thanks Giorgio Fasol, Valentino Barbierato and Gallery Monitor, Rome.