Regina VIRSERIUS

D'UN TEMPS L'AUTRE
The scientific objects, geometric shapes and spatial-temporal movement

The concept of time is a recurrent concern in the work of Regina Virserius : time that passes, that transforms us, that puts us into perspective through the body, landscape, places, objects, and rituals. Virserius was first attracted to the musée des arts et métiers (Museum of Arts and Crafts) by her interest in Foucault's pendulum*, a fascinating object that shows the movement of the earth. A heavy sphere made of steel, brass and lead with a diameter of 18 centimetres, the twenty-five kilogram pendulum has been suspended in the conservatory of the Arts and Crafts' church since 1855. She then became interested in the solid crystal manufactured by Wentzel in 1879, objects used to teach geometry and mathematics, and in the descriptive geometry instruments of Theodore Olivier *, a scientist close to the Lumière brothers.

As all these objects, photography is also a product of the spirit of scientific research and the positivism of nineteenth century. Like them, it is the fruit of a way of understanding the world, born of a desire and need to understand, measure and illustrate the world by using reason, making the universe calculable and readable, in other words, intelligible.

Through photography, the artist sought to give a visual form that is both rigorous and poetic to these scientific objects. After having scrutinized them extensively in their actual space, she approached them through the lens, a third eye that filters the information coming from outside. This vision through the lens of the camera creates a fracture of scale, resulting in a shift in time and space. In a way, her photographs capture simultaneously the image of the object and the virtual image that corresponds to it - as a double or reflection. Real objects are reflected in the mirror image of the photograph, which shows their virtual identities.