About my work II:

Peter Vink (1974) is a Dutch visual artist. He studied Time Based Arts & Design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam from 1997-2001.

His works mainly evolve around the concept of an existing space. The place where a work is exhibited is almost always inevitably an important part of the work itself. More often than not, it is even the cause for the art. The place of exhibition isn’t necessarily a place reserved for showing art; it can be anywhere. In the process of making this place more or less becomes the artist’s studio.

Generally Peter Vink adds something to the space he is working in in order to stress it’s characteristics. An example of this way of working is ‘Arti et Sedibus’ (2003).

This work was presented in Amsterdam art-society 'Arti et Amicitiae'. For this work he produced many picture frames, referring to 19th century picture cabinets (Arti was founded in the 19th century.) The various sizes of the frames are derived from measures present in the room through it’s architecture. For instance the square forms in the glass ceiling were copied on a scale 1:1. They were then piled up in the middle of the room in order to create seats, since this work was made as part of a group exhibition for Zetel (Seat). Zetel is a foundation that initiates, develops and manages authentic seating concepts.

In comparing ‘Arti et Sedibus’ to the more recent ‘De Pekelzaal’ (2006), it is obvious Peter Vink has gone through development yet sticking with the original concept of producing art in and derived from existing spaces.

For ‘De Pekelzaal’ (the title is the same as the name of the hall the work is in) he recreated the entire wooden construction that carries the roof and placed this twice below the original one. Movement detectors attached to this new construction set off lights that would shine exactly where visitors walked. This idea came from the title of the show ‘Reis door mijn Kamer’ (‘Journey through my Room’). The presence of light as an interactive, ever changing element of the work is something Peter Vink has included in his art since ‘Schakels’(2006) and functions as a counterpart to the unchangeable, given element of the existent space.

Apart from the introduction of light, ‘Schakels’(‘Links’) also differed from preceding works through the fact that Peter Vink did not add something to the existing space. In this case he took one element, the system ceiling, which he first removed and then rearranged.  The plates of the ceiling happened to have the same width as each of four pillars also present in the room. This brought on the idea of copying the pillars using the sytem ceiling. The copies were then placed opposite the original pillars. He then connected each original pillar with a copy through four walls also made of the system ceiling. By doing so, a different room division was created. Even the fluorescent lamps (originally part of the ceiling) were integrated in these walls. These lamps were controlled by a computer programmed to generate different compositions of light that would change after varying intervals of time. Every time the light changed, visitors would experience the work in a different way. The fluorescent lamps switching on and off produced sound which as a matter of course became part of the installation.

A good example of how Peter Vink’s starting points are always as situational as they are logical is the fact that he decided to work with the system ceiling for ‘Schakels’ because the curator of the show mentioned that he wanted it removed. This shows that his way of working is not a formulary one, but that it is open to influences that can come directly from every factor surrounding the preparation of a new work.