Iris Helena Hamers

Iris Helena Hamers creates visual worlds in the broadest sense, as her installations spread out in space as three-dimensional collages and occupy it. Her starting point is the visual culture of the internet and the often bizarre and absurd realities it creates. For her installations, Hamers draws on an almost infinite pool of images from her own archive, which has steadily grown over the years, as well as photos, memes, screenshots, search engine results, etc., which she extracts from the boundless expanses of the Internet. Often enough, this material also forms the basis for generating completely new images with the help of artificial intelligence. Digitally processed and assembled into backdrop-like sceneries, Hamers materialises spheres that can normally only be experienced virtually. The installations and individual pictorial elements reveal the artist's search behaviour, as algorithms continuously analyse every interaction and suggest similar content. This creates a kind of aesthetic feedback loop between man and machine, between intention and the flood of images – a principle that consequently also manifests itself in Hamer's works in a multi-layered way. As does the exhibition title Syzygy. The term comes from ancient Greek and means ‘team’ or ‘pairing’ and refers to two or more things that are closely connected and influence each other. The AI-generated image elements are created through specifically formulated text input from the artist, so-called prompts, which guide the image production and evoke certain motifs, aesthetics and formal qualities, as well as through the fusion of photos fed in from existing works or archived image material. The resulting visualisations are in turn based on vast amounts of references such as photographs, illustrations or graphics which have been used to train the intelligent algorithms beforehand and which determine their results. In a similar way, the artist's imagination is also influenced by the visual culture that surrounds her – by the flood of images that Iris Helena Hamers deliberately exposes herself in order to create her works. The installations, their pictorial elements, training data sets and, above all, the artist's imagination are therefore mutually dependent and closely interlinked. For Syzygy, Iris Helena Hamers has created two new installations in which real but also generated natural motifs such as plants, rocks and ice formations are intertwined with fabulous creatures, set pieces from social media, other Internet finds and her own staged photos, which in turn refer to the image material from the Internet. Once again, everything interpenetrates and is mutually dependent ¬– Syzygy. In space, Iris Helena Hamers gives the image fragments an analogue dimension and a fixed composition, which nevertheless changes continuously with the movement of the viewer and seems to follow its own immanent logic. The three-dimensional collages look like snapshots from animated computer worlds, as if they were in the process of being created. However, a linear narrative or clear sequence cannot be discerned. Rather, different temporalities, places and contexts come together and create a cosmos permeated by intense colours and artificial surfaces that absorbs, penetrates and unites both virtual and real space. Iris Helena Hamers (*1988 in Meerbusch) studied Fine Arts at the HFBK Hamburg from 2016 to 2020 in the class of Anselm Reyle and with the Art School Alliance Scholarship at the SUNY Purchase School of Art and Design, New York. Her works have been shown at PAW in Karlsruhe, at Luxembourg Art Week, at Golestani in Düsseldorf, at the Easterfield Festival of the Kunstverein in Hamburg and at Wassaic Project in New York, among others.