Bubble Peddler (jp.: Tamaya): in Kabuki theatre, a lively dance accompanied by Kiyomoto music. A man goes through the streets performing with soap bubbles. He makes all kinds of shapes with them and describes them with a series of witty songs and dances.
A figure of subversion of space and time – the metaphor of the Moebius strip – (as inspired by Wyn Evans' neon work of the same title) structures this entire exhibition which features in its centre a newly commissioned monumental neon text wall, Coloured Chinese Lanterns ..., 2007, where the private and the intimate, the conscious and the unconscious are vertiginously intertwined in an endless oscillation.
Bubble Peddler also includes Calibration and Sensitometry by R. Ziener (1987), 2006, a spectacular example of the most iconic works by Wyn Evans, the sculptural "chandeliers" pieces, regular chandeliers of various styles and origin, appropriated by the artists and turned into a medium where texts (literary sources from the last century) being transmitted through Morse-code are translated into pulsing light bulbs. The installation Dreamachine, 1998, explores further the phenomenon of perception: Here, this first sculpture to be looked at with your eyes closed constructs a subjective cinematic space where light pulses transmitted to the brain induce an almost psychedelic state of quasi-hypnosis.
Bubble Peddler, the first Wyn Evans solo show of such a scale in Austria, is a symphony of sophistication and elegance, orchestrated with grace and unique precision by a master of excess, but also of a minimal gesture.