Multiverres (Glassyverse), 2018

Site-specific installation. Custom-made wooden and glass display cases, found glass containers and globes. Variable dimensions.

Multiverres was conceived for a gallery that could only be viewed through its window. Rather than treating this glass barrier as external to the work, the installation incorporated the gallery itself as its largest display case.

Custom-built vitrines, glass globes and other transparent containers were arranged through shifts of scale and proportion. Some contained further vessels; others enclosed only empty space. Each sculpture remained autonomous while participating in a larger nested structure.

By multiplying transparent boundaries, the work explores how display produces distance and separates different regimes of presence. Artwork, gallery and viewer appear to occupy adjacent yet distinct realities, brought together within the same spatial system.

Installation view, Multiverres, The Contemporary Garage, Örebro, 2018 Photo © Ludivine Thomas-Andersson

Research relevance

Multiverres transposes the social and institutional distance produced by exhibition into the spatial structure of the work itself. The gallery window, the vitrines and the nested containers establish successive thresholds between viewer and artwork, making transparency coexist with separation and restricted access. The very condition that excludes the viewer from the exhibition space becomes one of the work’s constitutive elements.

The installation also develops a contrapuntal structure in which autonomous sculptures, empty volumes and distinct regimes of presence coexist within a coherent whole. Each container defines a separate perceptual space while remaining dependent on the larger system that contains it. The work therefore examines how framing, scale and containment organise relations between proximity and exclusion, autonomy and interdependence, visibility and access.

Multiverres, 2018. Installation details and autonomous sculptures. Top row and centre left: details of the installation; centre right: Multiverres ternaire, 2018; lower left: Temps en échec, 2018; lower right: It Was a Plan, 2018.