HAMSTER

  • Projector (3,500 lumens and 0’6 optics), DVD player, metallic structure
  • (230 X 230 x 80 cm), a vending machine for water and another one for dried fruit.
  • Floor with newspaper.

It is in video-installations like Hámster where Ampudia fully enters the “digestive tract,” with the creation of this trap -the gallery- that shakes the intellectual structure of the observer/observed. Hámster is the spatial representation of a cage in which the visitor inexorably and unconsciously ends up trapped, fed, looked after and looked at by someone (a giant boy) whose eyes watch him through a hole from an unknown outside place: the world that used to belong to the viewer. Turned into a human-mouse, the now disappeared viewer loses his elegance and posture, and is observed, monitored and “played with” by Ampudia himself. Consequently, the question of the work does not concern the meaning so much as the synergic activation of the thought of the viewer who sees his ideas of the work being broken down and turned into a game, a deceit which, even once outside the museum, will make him doubt the actual context of the reality he inhabits.

Text by Piedad Solans. LÁPIZ Revista Internacional de Arte nº 230-231, February / March 2006.