Berndnaut Smilde

Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde is interested in the ephemeral -- impermanent states of being which he documents through photographs. For Nimbus II, he used a smoke machine, combined with moisture and dramatic lighting to create a hovering indoor cloud in the empty setting of a sixteenth-century chapel in Hoorn, a small town in Holland. “I imagined walking into a museum hall with just empty walls. The place even looked deserted. On the one hand I wanted to create an ominous situation. You could see the cloud as a sign of misfortune. You could also read it as an element out of the Dutch landscape paintings in a physical form in a classical museum hall.”