SAVESTATES FROM A POSTVIRTUAL SPACE
In his first solo exhibition at Dada Post, Sebastian Denz presents large scale 3Dimensional portraits taken on his custom made 8×10 inch large-format-stereo-camera, designed by custom camera specialist Dr. Kurt Gilde. His subjects are the stars of the European skateboarding world. For almost three years, Denz has been traveling throughout Europe with members of the Carhartt skateboard team to shoot this series of 3D photographs, which are of a quality never seen before. This project, SKATEBOARDING.3D: SAVESTATES FROM A POSTVIRTUAL SPACE deals simultaneously with the growing presence and evolution of virtual spaces in our society, space in a phenomenological sense, and human beings who create their own construction of reality within these spaces
Inspired by the virtual world of videogames Denz seeks to: “Bring up for discussion a hybrid space that is somewhere in between virtual and real – a ‘Postvirtual Space’. Therefore he took photographs of more than 20 skaters with his unique large-format-3D-camera, which has been built especially for this project and took 2 years to produce. The exhibition shows some of these skaters in the ‘real hyper-reality’ of life-sized high- resolution 3D-images. With the added element of 3D glasses, the viewer becomes completely immersed “inside” the image. This consciously experienced illusion [can] transform into the subconscious sort and give the illusion the appearance of reality.
Denz is especially interested in the various modalities of “space” as a human system of reference, and its depiction in three-dimensional processes.
Transferring this process into imagery, Denz, a skateboarder himself, aims to provide some deeper insight into the strongly differentiated and codified skateboarding culture and its subversive elements.
With this project, SKATEBOARDING.3D, Sebastian Denz won the 20th International BFF (German Association of Freelance Photographers) Promotion Award 2008. The work was also presented at the Visual Gallery at Photokina this past September 2008 during the International Photography Fair Photokina in Cologne, Germany or at the Scope Art Fair in New York City. The book SKATEBOARDING.3D will be published in 2009 by Denz under Carhartt Streetwear and Prestel Publishing (Munich · Berlin · London · New York).
Sebastian Denz was born in 1974 in Grossburgwedel, Germany. He studied architecture at the University of Hanover, photography and fine arts at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hanover and photography at the University of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld where he obtained a degree in design from the Photography Department. He returned to the University of Applied Sciences Bielefeld to study photography from 2005 to 2007 (MA) and was awarded the 20th International BFF Prize.
Denz was a visiting artist at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2008. His works are in numerous collections and represented in national and international exhibitions.
previous next
