Lukas Felzmann

Lukas Felzmann

San Francisco based artist Lukas Flezmann creates complex environments that must be absorbed rather than scrutinized. The image above, Muse and Restraint, is from he Open Series that alludes to the benefits and hazards of learning. Symbols such as a wigned blackboard, barbed wire, towering stacks of books and dangling, knife-like shards of stone foncront the viewer in a a claustrophobic room that he refers to as "anti-space".

Combining mural sized photographs with found objects, Felzmann alludes to the powerful forces of nature and time. the environment he creates becomes a stage where oppositional elements play off of one another to create a tense and evocative balance. the installlation sems to suggest that learning – the measured, contemplative scrutiny of our relationship to the natural, the cultural and the historical – is the only way to keep hope alive in these unsettling times.

(talking about room for endangered species) Lukas Felzmann

"This installation came from the experience of tension between nature and culture in the San Francisco Headlands, but stands as a symbolic gesture for any place. It was the close proximity of the endless urban sprawl to the "park" as nature sanctuary and how easily I could move from one to the other which influenced my work while I was there. Nature seemed to be almost reclaiming the ruins of civilization, but when I came across a list of Endangered Species I was struck by the incredible amount of names on it.
I decided to make a piece about this with an installation which would embrace the landscape, bring it in to the empty architecture of the building so that they become part of each other and both could be contemplated in the same space. Through twelve Camera Obscura projections, which fell on a transparent list of all Endangered Species, one was surrounded inside the room with an upside down outside. The space created mirrored the dichotomy of the beauty outside and the terror inside." Felzmann
Felzmann was born in Zurich in 1959, earned his MFA at the San Francisco Art Instute in Photography. He has taught photography at the California College of the ARts, the San Francico Art Institue and at Stanford Univeristy since 1993. His photographs have been shown in Europe, Egypt, Columnia and the US.

I think overall Felzmann tries to to get his viewers to think about the impact we have on our environment and nature, I really enjoy his work not only because of it's beauty but also for concept. Felzmann communicates strong ideas in his work.