To view all works created by Michael Wright and the collaborative work Wright & Van ‘t Hoog please go to: 
https://vimeo.com/album/5283357

I have visited the camps in Majdanik Lublin, which left a deep impression and residing sense of the weight of human abuse. Visiting Berlin I was drawn to the Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial and spent several days exploring the space for possible interpretations. Following a heavy rainstorm the monument was empty of all human activity and I remained alone in the labyrinth of steles. Looking to the sky for relief from the overbearing weight of the monument I realized that the stones framed the sky in a severe geometry and that by moving through the space with the camera facing skyward it was possible to morph the geometry. Walking and turning through the space I could give visual form to some of the complex psychological and symbolic readings suggested by the monument. By shifting the perspective onto the negative spaces the movement of the camera could generate associative readings of oppressive symbolism. It was my aspiration to generate a poetic rather than a documentary interpretation as the most appropriate way to honour a memory, or another artist’s work is to seek to generate another work of art. The dead weight of power seems always to require creative subversion and there is always the possibility of redemption when the mind finds a means to poetically transform that which seems immutable or indomitable.

I am grateful to Hans van Pinxteren who on seeing the video sent me a sentence from a poem of the Jewish Poet Paul Celan.
Todesfuge

'We dig a grave in the clouds, there you are not laying in a narrow way.'

  Land Clearance 17
Two videos are juxtaposed. In the upper image the cavernous ancient salt mine has the scale and echoing sound qualities of a vast underground cathedral space in which people are drifting in boats in darkness. In the lower scene workmen are clearing an area of concrete studded with resistant forms that are redolent of a community or encampment. The actions of forcible clearance strikes a disturbing chord of resonance with the process of ‘ethnic cleansing’.

  Laocoon 13
The 'Gaze' is more than passive reception, actively searching and projecting conceptions, expectations, desires and fears. The choreography of the camera movement reveals the animating nature of the gaze both as consuming and empathetic response.

Melting Snow

Fibonacci improvisation