During the first months of 2020, Simone Rothstein photographed the sky and its clouds at dusk. Like the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who began photographing clouds in his pursuit of abstraction, Rothstein perceives clouds as more than they are, seeing them as reflections of the viewer’s state of mind and as the scaffolding for their personal projections.
Here the artist goes further: She slices the clouds into pieces, taking away their wholeness, and deconstructs the horizon, now full of ambiguity. As in Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis of contemporary society, we lose consistency as reality becomes liquid and uncertain. If in other times, towers have represented power, protection and control, in “liquid times” they are as fragile and ephemeral as everything that dissolves in the air.
Using the images, Rothstein’s “Cloud Towers” shelter all of us who are left without a safe horizon.
Installation Photos: Michael Shvadron
Artist:
Simone Rothstein
Curator:
Daria Kaufmann
