Wonderful sculptures from common objects
Dissection is a specialty of the artist Fabian Oefner. He breaks down common items one by one, exposing their inner workings to create great art. In his most recent body of work, The Heisenberg Collection, he dissects six items that all serve as memory keepers. All of the sculptures, which included shoes, a clock, a tape recorder, a camera, and a black box, were filled with plastic, cut into bits, and then painstakingly put together. The end effect is art that appears recognizable from a far but starts to disappear as spectators go closer.
Werner Heisenberg’s renowned Uncertainty Principle served as Oefner’s source of motivation. According to quantum mechanics, this indicates that it gets harder and harder to accurately measure a second house, like location or time, when you measure a first property, like motion or charge. According to Oefner, “I used this principle to these 6 statues.” You can clearly see the object while you are far away from them. But as you approach to look within, the shape of the object begins to change before disappearing entirely. You can never view an object’s entire structure and its internal workings at the same time as an observer. The clarity of one vision decreases as accuracy increases, and vice versa. The sculpture’s appearance is determined solely by how you contact with it.
Every artwork offers a fresh closeness with these well-known things by luring the visitor inside to examine its intricate features. Oefner must devise his own plan for how to take apart each one, oftentimes damaging them as he goes. This makes the creative process laborious. In actuality, he had to use 2 Leica cameras because the glue had damaged the first one. Oefner thoroughly considered the materials he utilized for the piece, and they all have a connection to the same theme: memory.
Oefner says, “They all record something.” It is clear what the camera, tape recorder, and black box are recording when they are used together—either a picture, a voice, a piece of music, etc. The clock preserves time, or you could say that it keeps track of it. The sneakers are the one element that is a little less noticeable. But in my opinion, sneakers function as motion-tracking recorders. Nike Cortez shoes from 1985 are being worn. I often ponder the various locations they traveled to around the globe. Thus, the series is somewhat about the disintegration or deformation of memory.
Six everyday items were disassembled by Fabian Oefner and turned into sculptures made of broken plastic.
To alter how we perceive the items, the sculptor combines their component parts.
Every item was chosen based on how it pertains to preserving human memories.
Oefner refers to a pair of sneakers as “recording devices, that keep track of our movement.”
