On Eternities TabletS
Curated By
Sarah Walko
November.24 - February.28.2021
Video by Ian Lee
“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 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 ring powerfully in her words. 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 horizons of interior and exterior landscapes. The title of the exhibition is from Norwegian poet and writer Hans Børli who, in addition to writing, survived as a prisoner of war in a camp in Norway during World War II fighting the Nazi regime, worked as a teacher and a woodsman all of his life. Senstad recently found herself revisiting his works in the face of our current crisis, drawing on his poems that also traverse eternity, nature and the human condition during crisis.
Senstad’s immersive light sculpture installation, Elements III Blue, built of horizontal and vertical blue light structures, explores liminal spaces, 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 (even though the sea is actually transparent, it simply reflects the atmosphere and the sky). The experiential installation explores how light redefines a space, how color affects us from the physiological to the philosophical, how we define our “blue,” and how we define ourselves in vast placeless space when our finite nature as beings dissolves into the outer and inner nature of the world. 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.” In disintegrating the lines of the horizon, the distance becomes the present, fusing space and time, the sky out there is now right here, the vastness of the sea surrounding us, is deeply within us, as Rilke harkens, “The world is large but in us it is deep as the sea.” Like an internal wave (the type of gravity wave that occurs on internal “surfaces” within ocean waters when there is rapidly changing water density with increasing depth) we navigate through the installation with a sense of infinity and eternity in all directions. “I must be a mermaid,” Anais Nin wrote, “I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”
Senstad's Borealis sculptural works are color structures carrying this 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.” These pieces call to mind the invitation of curiosity, wonder and awe. Like a book that contains a story that spans centuries but still is a thing we can hold in our hands and as Thomas Merton says, "Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” Let the paradoxes simply all be right there, existing with us. Writer Alice Munroe when speaking of her process explains she doesn’t follow the story as if it were a road taking her somewhere, it is more like being in a house. “Everybody knows what a house does, how it encloses space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and presents what is outside in a new way. This is what I want my stories to do for people.”
Finally, the third body of work in this exhibition are the Cosmosis Collages. A photographic body of work developed in dialogue with the birth of Senstad's light sculpture installations Elements in 2018, as an elaborate previsualization of light and color compositions and spatial structures for the experiential light and color environments that were to become a new chapter in Senstad's oeuvre. 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. "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." Senstad explains.
By layering and collaging negative film emulsion, Senstad has archived and reassembled them into compositions. They reflect ideas of structures, geometry, matrices and frequencies. Selected abstract pieces are perceptually spherical and ephemeral, but within their layers we find detail on the cellular level. The abstract color sphere works introduce the vertical dimension, referencing the connection between earth and cosmos we see in Elements, creating an ascending emotion. This ascension or a feeling of gradually, slowly but definitively moving towards the light, that is the tone of all of these photographic works. There is also a clear command of the medium in that Senstad’s work has a long history and background in photography as both a photographer and master printer, printing her own work until dark rooms disappeared with the emergence of the digital media era.
These pieces were also influenced by Russian philosopher, teacher, and librarian Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov whose works’ core was based on overcoming human alienation. His geo-engineering of the earth project and writings on the resurrection of the dead “are meant to abolish alienation on both a spatial axis and a temporal one. By geo-engineering the earth and the universe, we resolve the problem of alienation from the cosmos. By resurrecting the dead we solve the problem of alienation from time. Together, they facilitate a grand unification of space-time in a metaphysics of kinship. ”1 For him, living within kinship involves overcoming dualisms, mediations, and representations. “Fedorov imagines a world of kinship existing beyond subject and object relations, mind and body dualities, oppositions between nature and culture, divisions of labor in human societies, and even the distinction between life and death. He also thought our underlying cosmology presupposes that we are not a part of the universe, so much as beings that stand outside of it. We study the cosmos from a point of detachment; we do things to it from afar.” And ethics comes in when there is a division between inquiry and responsibility obviously; we have built a world where we can study things without being responsible for changing them. “For Fedorov, this isn’t just an ethical problem—it’s a metaphysical problem.2
American poet Walt Whitman, had a lifelong dialectical relationship with the cosmos in many of his poems and how he lived his life. Literary critic Jane Hirshfield wrote of him “Whitman chose to live as a person of the threshold, who could throw off the limits of what he was permitted to say, the limits of what he was permitted to be and speak finally for and AS a cosmos.” Whitman was not in observation of but rather in kinship with that which is way out there, in the depths and realms of the universe. And American novelist Flannery O’Connor wrote of the allness in everything in her narrative sentence, “The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete…” It is the artists in this dialogue with the silence, the voids, the immeasurable that is part of the invitation for the viewer, who before may not have even understood it was a conversation one can enter. And the voids in Senstads works are immeasurable. Like the Japanese "ma" which literally means "gap", "space", or "pause" the importance of negative space and empty space holding as much weight as the positive space is evident. The work simultaneously neutralizes and radicalizes space, creating a strong presence within absence.
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 “Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. 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.” The work also calls to mind the idea that space and the universe is curved, therefore can blow up like a balloon. As musician and composer Craig Minowa writes, “And since there is no time on the energy level, and if you remove time and you could see far enough, the farthest that you can possibly see would be the back of your head. So you can search as far as you want to search, and you can journey as far as you want to journey, and you’ll ultimately end up right here, right now.”
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 live them into infinity. One foot at a time, without knowing where or if there is anything solid to stand on except perhaps, eternity.
1 Journal #88 - February 2018, Trevor Paglen, Fedorov’s Geographies of Time
2 Journal #88 - February 2018, Trevor Paglen, Fedorov’s Geographies of Time
“I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds.”
– Joy Harjo
SARAH WALko | Curator
Sarah Walko has a BA in studio art practices from the University of Maryland and an MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design. For the past fifteen years she has curated for institutions, non-profits and independent projects. She has served as a director of three arts organizations and is a contributing writer on contemporary art, literature and film for numerous publications. She is currently the Director of Education and Community Engagement at the Visual Art Center of New Jersey. Prior positions include Director of Arts Programming at Marble House Project, Executive Director of Triangle Arts Association and curator at Savannah College of Arts and Design.
Recent Curatorial projects include Now Can You See the Monument? A solo exhibition by Donna Conklin King at Index Art center in Newark, NJ (2019), Between Wisdom and Madness, a survey of sculpture artists in New Jersey co curated with Agnes Dejas at Index Art Center, Newark, NJ (2019), No Man Spirits Our Dust at 550 Gallery in Long Island City, NY (2019), Everything Else is too Narrow at Baerum Kunstall in Oslo, Norway (2016) Advances and Retreats, Decomposing Hierarchies, and Crest and Trough, Public art video projections, Manhattan Bridge Anchorage, NYC (2015 & 2016) , The World and its Things in the Middle of Their Intimacy, Fridman Gallery, NYC (2014), and A Cage Went in Search of a Bird, Radiator Gallery, NYC (2013).
She was on the jury for the Brooklyn Arts Council public art selection in 2020 and 2019, was an invited Panelist, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Craft and Horror in Contemporary Art, Guttenburg Arts Residency Juror 2019, is on the advisory board of coLAB Arts and on the board of directors of Summit Public Art.
@sarahwalko