„The Smell of Snow“ was created during the winter months of 1993/1994 while living in Orono, ME, USA.
This early work from the “Sculptures of Thoughts” series was created in the winter of 1992 – 1993 in Maine, USA, at a time when I was not yet familiar with the entire body of work by the Japanese artist Yoko Ono from the 1960s. In 1963, Ono had created an instruction-based work titled “Snow Piece,” which, while based on the general idea of falling snow, focused on the theme of falling snow against the backdrop of a description of a conversation between two people.
Years later though, I realized I must have come across some of her early works already as a boy when I was scrolling through the German youth magazine BRAVO at the age of about six or seven, that my six years older sister used to leave sitting around in the family apartment between 1967 – 1970.
An extended text about sources and influences on my work is currently being worked out and will be released on this website once it is finished.
The Imagination was first displayed in 1997 as part of the Apart 23 exhibition in Basel, Switzerland. In 2001, „Snowfall“ was publicly installed in the colonnade of the Unternehmen Mitte in the center of Basel. At that time, the Installation of Thoughts was still featured under its working title, „Snowfall“, which was changed during the translation process in 2021 to distinguish it from Yoko Ono’s „Snow Piece“ from 1963. In 2001, the artwork was first mentioned in the public media in a review of the exhibition ‚reTROspektiv:jeltsch‘ at the Gundeldinger Kunsthalle Basel, which was published in the cultural section ‚Agenda‘ of Basler Zeitung on September 13, 2001.
In 2013, the Installation of Thoughts was part of the annual exhibition at the Pataphysical Institute in Basel (PIB)
Note: In recent years, the Internet Archive has successfully saved and time-stamped the original text of this work. Furthermore, the text of the imagination was sent via registered mail as proof of existence (POE) to extend copyright protection