A Picture and a Box
Pictures are revealed through the act of looking. Like places they can be opened and closed depending on our wish to engage with them. Paintings can be thought of as an exterior vision in that they refer to conditions outside themselves. At the same time they also embody the interior of the painter’s perception. At the same time they are interior ones reflected first in the painter creating the work, whose perception is communicated to the viewer. The painter’s body as house and place for observation and experience is essential for making the painting. In this way, it can be argued that paintings not only bring the outside in; they bring the inside out. They implement and encapsulate memory in a place, like a box. The viewer is invited to open this box, enter into dialogue with the painting and decipher its content. This thinking about place in painting as boxes, frames and views was central to the exhibition A Box and a Picture, my dissertation show for the fellowship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo.
The Academy gallery space is one large open room. In the middle stand four pillars demarcating a room within a room. The presence of the pillars makes it impossible to see the whole space in one glance. The interior repeating space is approximately the same size as Winterstudio, which gave me a ghostly feeling of its presence. Showing just a few paintings on the wall was a way to activate the room. The exhibition consisted of works made in Ringsveen, Høvikodden, Jeløya and Oslo accompanied by the self-published book, A Picture and a Box.
The inversion of the titles in the exhibition and the book - A Box and a picture / A Picture and a Box, played on the type of inversions taking place in the work. In the book a spread was often used to show a drawing and a painting of the same motif. In a similar way, I used the exhibition to show how repetition and translation occurring in paintings made in one place was related to decisions made in another. For instance, how the roughly executed panels from Høvikodden related to the more gestural type of work made at Jeløya, or how the dark almost monochromatic forest wall at Ringsveen found its counterpart in a bright street painting made in Oslo. Through these types of juxtapositions, I could show how painting relates to places outside itself, but at the same time retain a place of its own.
