Introduction
THE PARK
Ocherbauer’s starting premise was to photograph trees in the parks of Graz and Berlin, thereby immediately establishing her interest in the tension between the “found” (the natural organic landscape) and the “made” (the park as a cultivated terrain shaped and ‘mastered’ by humans”). She then doubles down on this tension by digitally manipulating her images – the landscape architect’s work reinforced or supplanted by the artist’s. As an initial premise this has legs – but, as with all great ideas, it is the execution that defines the success of the project. Ocherbauer’s execution is masterful. She creates glowing images so full of simultaneous beauty and intellectual heft that even the most cynical or uninterested viewer will have trouble resisting the seduction.
The Park 24, for example, reveals a forest section of Borgesian complexity and chromatic splendor. The picture plane is divided and subdivided by tree trunks, dozens of branches, and thousand upon thousand of twigs. It is with these twigs that Ocherbauer’s digital games are most noticeable. As in a manuscript illumination or a Jan Van Eyck painting, Ocherbauer has enlarged the smallest branches such that perception is not affected by the distance between the lens and the subject – it is only the absolute size that counts. This process has the paradoxical effect of fictionalizing reality by insisting – dogmatically and obsessively – on it’s very accuracy. From a formal perspective, it also creates an image of immense density, suggesting both the order of a gargantuan metropolitan public transit system (or is it the visual manifestation of the natural laws which govern these trees? Or the artificial order imposed by the park on this growth?), and the chaos of making such a system work. It’s Mondrian gone mad.
Outline of James Rohrbach's review "Park Perfect" March 2010
http://www.jamesrohrbach.org/2010/03/20/ocherbauer/
