PROFILE: DAVID ROSETZKY

: : Christopher Chapman

: : printable version  

He began to build objects whose surfaces were typically smoothed by gloss paint and matt vinyl. These things, which sometimes appeared as benches or cells, were sculptural rather than functional, their use value ambiguous. Even something as recognizable as a rectangular tropical fish tank became transformed into a simulation of something less easily identifiable. Supported by chrome legs, and topped with a flesh-coloured enamelled lid, the aquarium was fetishised.

At the time, we read it as a version of the real thing, a simulation and the object itself simultaneously. Some were even tempted to think of its microcosm as an allegory of our own human environments.

The concept of the exchange of mediated spaces has continued to operate throughout Rosetzky's practice. Some of his works of the mid-1990s incorporated actual video screens into constructed objects and installations. A smooth 'bench seat' incorporated a horizontal monitor showing a young man being given a facial massage; and a series of video portraits used single monitors as a part of room sized installations incorporating pseudo-furniture and neon. Some of Rosetzky's recent video installations are incorporated into large physical environments where the viewer's spatial relationship to the on-screen characters becomes complicated.

In Rosetzky's single channel works and video installations since 2000 he has presented a range of characters in hermetic modern environments. Sometimes these are actual interiors, more often they have been orchestrated: minimal and fashionable spaces with wood panelling, long sofas, modernist lighting. These environments are the settings for characters who enact monologues about identity: how they suffer feelings of isolation and insecurity, especially in relation to others. In the video Justine (2000), the character says "When I'm alone I feel odd. I feel kind of nothing. Which could be nice. But it's not. It's weird."

A common theme is that Rosetzky's characters feel isolated when in the company of others, as in Weekender (2001), and, even more strongly, that their identities, the way they act and respond to others, is conditioned by their environment, and the expectations and responses of those around them.

Dramatically, in Hothouse (2001), these sentiments are expressed by characters even as their bodies are caressed by the hands of unseen others.

If Rosetzky's video work suggests a dissolution of self that is a condition of modern life, he suggests a strange sense of connectedness too. In the installation Commune (2003), life-sized cut-out mounted photographs of a group of young people are placed in relation to each other with an illuminated plastic lighting tube connecting all of them in an endless circuit. In the video Summer blend (2001), a man and woman rubbing their bodies with moisturizer continually fade-morph into each other. In the video Without You (2004), a series of faces slowly morph through a strange peeling of cranial sections, as though they are all made up of parts of each other, and their identities are as fragile as the delicate curl of coffee cup cardboard.