Curated by Erlend Hammer
The exhibition title_Oh how time flies_ is taken from a video work of the same name by Mai Hofstad Gunnes. In the work Cat Power’s music video Cross Bones Style from 1998 is juxtaposed with Madonna’s Lucky Star from 1983. In Cat Power’s video the artist sings and dances against a white background in a way that clearly refers to Madonna in 1983. In Hofstad Gunnes’ linking of the two videos a kind of double portrait of the two female artists and two decades is developed.
Paolo Chiasera’s works take their point of departure in the relationship between the artwork and the institutions where such artworks are presented. The Fog is an oil painting where the subject, a picturesque, romantic sky, gradually disappears. Each time the work is exhibited, a new layer of paraffin wax is brushed over the canvas. In the work The End of Black Brain we see the end product of a process that began with a painting that was placed in the metal cylinder seen in the photograph. The work emerges here as documentation of a minimalist sculpture, an element further underscored by the fact that the photographer is Attilio Maranzano, who is well known for his documentation of the post-minimalist art to which Chiasera refers.
Matthew Antezzo’s works activate the lake Lille Lungegårdsvann as a geographical point. The inland lake is used as a point of departure for a series of works that explores various levels of abstraction. In the works Time and Space the theme is found at its most abstract, while The Lake (A Friendly Gesture) moves one level closer to ‘concrete reality’ with a concrete sculpture that functions as a sketch for the last level, where Lille Lungegårdsvann itself is used to make a compass so that with visual markers accurately mounted around the lake one can use Bergen’s well known park area to get one’s bearings in relation to the world beyond the mountains.
Ane Mette Hol works with objects that are not what they seem. By using the medium of drawing to create copies of everyday objects she explores issues of the status of the original in art. For the exhibition she is producing a new work in the series Reverse Drawing where rolls of cardboard are recreated in the form of metre-long drawings which are shown rolled up with information about the actual function of the original.
Eve K. Tremblay’s works are about memory and time. The video In & Out The Memory Palace shows the artist and her cousin in various situations at an old French chateau, in the library, in the garden and so on. The two women read aloud from books, alone and to each other, but at the same time appear to be possible versions of the same person, or, as in the exhibition’s title work by Mai Hofstad Gunnes, they express two different epochs presented simultaneously.
Erlend Hammer lives and works in Berlin. He has been a writer and critic for among other things Kunstkritikk, Billedkunst and Dagbladet. In 2008 Hammer’s Samlede Kunstkritikker (Collected Art Criticism) appeared from Ctrl+Z Publishing. He has curated exhibitions at among other places Hordaland Art Centre, Bergen; Lydgalleriet, Bergen and Lautom, Oslo. He graduated as an art historian from the University of Bergen and did his curatorial training at Bergen National Academy of the Arts.
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Supported by Arts Council Norway
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Downloadable text by Paolo Chiasera (click linked text):
“The Horizon after Commodity, Notes on Perversion”
A text by the artist Paolo Chiasera, first time published on the occasion of the exhibition “Oh how time flies”, Bergen Kunsthall. The text is produced with support of the University of Oslo on the occasion of a talk on September 23rd 2011.
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Captions
_All images: Mai Hofstad Gunnes, Oh how time flies, 2009, still from video.
Courtesy of the artist. _