Spirit of Landscape
Hugo Webster
1 Aug–31 Oct 2023
The moment of immersive connection describes a phenomenon of experience – a moment of inward understanding and comprehension, a Zen moment of satori.
This series of video works by Hugo Webster explore theories of transparency, symmetry, and perception, valuing ephemeral moments of communion with the natural world. Unpacking the revelatory capacity of encounters with nature, Spirit of Landscape sees a world beyond surfaces.
Curator Loqui Paatsch
Sourced field recording, 50min.
Please listen while viewing the moving image work.
Immersive connection. A moment of inward understanding and comprehension.
Hugo Webster, Landscape 10, 2022. Projection, 10min. Courtesy the artist.
Wisps of a winter landscape shiver through fogged glass and I experience the light of a landscape I cannot see. This is a moment of intuition and observation.
These small abstractions aim to facilitate an inner landscape through ‘this faint evidence, at the borders of nothingness’ (Koren 1994).
The series invites the envelopment of one’s experience within its rapport. Breathing and observing with the motions of the works. Inherently experiential, its exploration of light through organic abstraction is the rustic patina, the organic effervescent.
Hugo Webster, Landscape 11, 2022. Projection, 10min. Courtesy the artist.
Pablo Helguera remarks on the artist as being a ’provider of frameworks on which experiences can form’ and ‘generate new insights’ (Helguera 2011). A framework for self-initiated experience, here, the abstractions of natural ecologies hope to perform this provision of a ‘comfortable space’.
Hugo Webster, Landscape 12, 2022. Projection, 10min. Courtesy the artist.
The tearoom: a place of pause, of experience and of observation. Within the tearoom ‘every single object seems to expand in inverse proportion to its actual size’ (Koren 1994). The framework of this experience reveres this moment; to take pause, and in this find an ephemeral intimacy. A rapport with the internal landscape.
Moments of rapport amid light, space, and self. The ‘inner landscape’ spoken of by Minor White, seeing ‘a world beyond surfaces’ (Lyons 1966) proposes a poetic self-reflection in these moments. In our perception of a conceptual “space” a subjective rapport, we explore this landscape, corporeal and incorporeal at once.
Hugo Webster, Landscape 13, 2022. Projection, 10min. Courtesy the artist.
‘This faint evidence, at the borders of nothingness.’
A moment of comprehension.
~Hugo Webster, 2023.
Blindside Mobile is a curated online platform for projects in the digital space by Victorian-based creatives.
Hugo Webster is an emerging multidisciplinary artist working primarily in photography, video, sound and installation. He currently maintains his practice in Naarm/Melbourne; the unceded land of the Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung language groups of the Eastern Kulin Nations.
Hugo's works explore moments of contemplation and tranquillity within the human relationship to natural ecologies, engaging phenomenon of experience through methods of light abstraction and immersion. He continues to develop long-term works alongside active research and digital and physical experimentation.
Loqui Paatsch is an emerging curator and arts worker living in Melbourne/Naarm. She graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2022, and works primarily with photography and text. As a curator, her interests lie in serial and conceptual photography, as well as research focusing on post-object practice and abstraction. Loqui's writing and work has been featured in No No No Magazine, VCA Artspace, Asbestos, and as part of a growing pile of art-related detritus at the back of her wardrobe.