Walk into Gallery 2 at the Wellcome Collection in London and, after passing through a couple of doors, you'll find yourself enveloped in mist, but not just any mist—this haze is imbued with bright colors. So thick is the fog that you can barely make out your feet or see what's in front of you.The installation is Ann Veronica Janssens' yellowbluepink, and like the name suggests, the colors light up the vaporous space that you travel through. Completely directionless, it's disorientating, which is its aim. There's even a list of tips that people are encouraged to read before experiencing it.
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"Please move slowly and carefully and do not run," Janssens says. "Please do not proceed into the space if you feel unwell." "All persons entering the installation do so assuming all responsibility for any risk or hazard that may result therefrom,"—just in case you walk into a wall, which is a possibility."Color is caught in a state of suspension," runs the press release. "Defying the apparent immateriality of the medium and veiling any detail of surface or depth within the space. As visitors walk through this thickly coloured world, attention is focused on the process of perception itself."Credit: Wellcome Trust The installation launches the museum's States of Mind exhibition, which will be a year-long look at human consciousness and what defines it. "At the heart of the subject lies the ‘hard question’ of why objective brains give rise to our subjective consciousness," the museum says. "Neuroscience can explain the relationship between brain activity and conscious functions such as memory retention or decision making. Yet it struggles to describe how the activity of neurons results in our individual experience of colour, as in Janssens’ vibrant environment."In yellowbluepink your perception becomes isolated. If you've been in a club staggering about in brightly-lit dry ice at the early hours of the morning, your sight blinkered and struggling to make anything out, you'll know the sensation well. And that's the idea of the piece: to make you relfect upon your own awareness.
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“Without understanding exactly how it happens, we are all experts in our own experience," says curator of the project, Emily Sargent. "Ann Veronica Janssens’ sensory installation reminds us of the richness of our interaction with the world; a personal universe of experience constructed within the confines of our skulls. Janssens’ work disorientates the viewer through the dissolution of normal perceptual boundaries. The mist appears to disintegrate the materiality of the space whilst at the same time imparting a materiality and tactility to light and color. Visitors are participants in an experiment which challenges habitual practices of seeing and accords a fresh emphasis to the simple fact of experience.”
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