Elements III Blue, installation image courtesy of artist, Anne Katrine Senstad
PRESS RELEASE
OPENART is pleased to present:
On Eternities Tablets: Anne Katrine Senstad
Virtual Solo Exhibition
Curated by Sarah Walko
November 24 – February 28, 2021
”You cannot legislate music to lockstep nor can you legislate the spirit of the music to stop at political boundaries …Or poetry, or art, or anything that is of value or matters in this world, and the next worlds.”
- Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo, the current poet laureate of the United States, writes a sets of instructions for the soul in her book of poems Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings. The spirit of myth and the subconscious in everything, her imagery of immense landscapes that fuse with the vast stretches of our hidden mind and the politics of being human through her own experience as an indigenous woman in the US. They float across lands and time in a way that parallels the visual works presented in this exhibition by Norwegian artist Anne Katrine Senstad. The exhibition brings together three bodies of work based on light, space and perception, and investigate interior and exterior horizons. The title is from a Norwegian poet and writer, Hans Børli whose poems Senstad recently found revisiting and drawing on that also traverse eternity, nature and the human condition during crisis.
Elements III Blue is Senstad’s immersive light installation built of horizontal and vertical blue lights. A space both enclosed and open where the horizon in the distance is absent. Blue in nature makes us think of the sea and the sky. The experiential installation explores how light redefines a space, affects us from the physiological to the philosophical, how we define our “blue,” and define ourselves in vast placeless space. Senstad explains “I wanted to create a matrix of horizontal and vertical expressions of blue light, evoking fractal topologies. In space, distance is the present—the horizon extending far beyond our frame of reference as blue columns of light ascend to the empyrean. I wanted to interpret the idea of blue as a physical environment out of my own curiosity about the emotional, physiological, and scientific phenomena that constitute our concept of color and as we experience it. But also, one lifelong pursuit and desire in my work is to capture the impossible beauty and sensorial properties of color in the abstract.”
Borealis Sculptures are Senstad’s color structures carrying notions of ephemerality that pervades all of her work but embedded now in a utilitarian plexiglass object of mass production. The shadows cast shades of blues, greens and whites onto the wall, dissolving planes and creating a sense that each piece is hovering just slightly from the surface. The compositions, form and color are minimalist but as you rotate around them new layers of transparent geometric colors create new forms and new colors. In their color, these sculptures reference the northern hemisphere, atmosphere, layers of ice in glaciers, mountains. “As a northern spherical phenomena the Aurora Borealis operates in electrically charged color compositions recorded in our retinal memory, evoking that of a stratospheric elusivity,” Senstad writes. “In these works, I can examine the relationship between ephemerality and spectral luminous shades within concrete planes. By harnessing it onto the physical surface, I objectify and materialize that which cannot be held and reorganize light and color into the folds of the physical. It plays with the transformation of the ephemeral into an entity and a phoneme shaping of time.”
Cosmosis Collages is the third final body of photographic works in this exhibition, developed in dialogue with the birth of Senstad's light sculpture installations Elements in 2018. The photographic works are conceptually and politically inspired by early 20th century movements such as the Suprematists and Constructivists. These aesthetics of utopian and scientific ideals that were deeply engaged in experiments in medicine, technology, philosophy, and psychology while simultaneously engaging in concepts of the cosmic universe. Practitioners sought deep spiritual alignment while experiencing the question what is it to be a being in a physical state and how can we master eternity, life, and mortality.
The title, Cosmosis refers to the idea of experiencing oneness with the universe as a result of these investigations and experiments. Senstad was influenced by these philosophers who sought to conquer "eternity" and become immortal. Senstad explains: "It's been of a great interest to me to examine what drives human activities towards the desire for eternal life as part of my work on ethics and perception, which I find is much of the psychological central underpinnings of the very existence of society. The illusion of vanity can serve as fuel for a forward driving search for new scientific discoveries, creative inventions and technological developments when it is benevolent, yet when it exists as a negative force, it swings the pendulum to a series of unsupportive manifestations such as loss of moral compass, immense greed, and various forms of societal madness such as cultism. One can say that an understanding of internal freedom and oneness with the universe, as in the psychological and emotional state of cosmosis, in various religious and esoteric philosophies, is a form of true attainment of happiness or satisfaction, and is represented as a state of infinite euphoria, a purity of spirit and ecstatic rapture. In eastern thought, we see that the release from all human suffering, and configurations for the path towards ultimate liberation, is the very idea of wealth itself."
We are living in a time of global pandemic, severe climate change crises deeply affecting our blue oceans and worldwide uncertainty of our future. A question that roams from literal to philosophical in all of Senstad’s work is simply where is there and where will there be solid ground to stand on? It is not a question that demands an answer. Like Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice on uncertainty “Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given to you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.”
It is this journey through the universe that Senstad’s work takes us on to ultimately end up delivering us back to ourselves, facing our own horizons, within this massive universe in which we are connected to it all. It is a reminder to not carry the questions, but to live them into infinity.
For inquiries & media information:
info@openartadvisory.com
For sales inquiries:
Christine Lee
christine@openartadvisory.com
+917.224.0680
www.openartadvisory.com
Image courtesy of the artist.