Pencil on wall, 3 x 12m, empty space 3 x 12 x 9m
Gallery 21:25, Oslo 2005
This (Here We Are. Actually)
Pencil on wall, corner, ca. 2,5 x 3,5 x 3,5 m
Gallery Blunk, Trondheim 2006
Something
Pencil on paper, six papers á 1,5 x 2 m
Stavanger kunstforening, Stavanger 2006
About:
I was going to have an exhibition in the student gallery 21:25 in Oslo. I wanted to show many different ideas I had, installations etc. But when it came close to the exhibition date, it all felt meaningless. I had been feeling this since I started at the art academy in Oslo. Everything floating around, without any fixed points. The feeling of insecurity and troubled mind culminated at this point in time also because of the stress I experienced in front of the task of making a public show. I had two choices: Either to go on as planned, neglecting the burden of meaninglessness, or I could take this problem seriously and find a solution. I chose the last option. I quit the old plan. I tried to find a way to work with the problem at hand. Through a reduction process I got the idea of stripping the gallery room and going into a work process of making dots on one of the walls. I saw the dot as the simplest sign and wanted to be inside a process where i could feel very directly a switching between meaning and meaninglessness, the switching between the dots received as singular elements and received as a whole. The four days I had for preparing the exhibition I made dots on the innermost wall of the room.
I remember going to the gallery in the morning on the first day to start working. It felt very special. Sitting in the subway train I listen to Mozart or some other classical music on my md-player. Somewhere in the world a big accident had happened that day. I heard it on the news or saw it in the news paper earlier. Many people had died. People in the train was looking tired and not so satisfied with their lives. Still it was a strong feeling of something like: “This is the world and we are alive”. It felt both very sad and very beautiful at the same time. I were both smiling and almost crying.
I came into the empy white room. I looked at the empty wall for a bit and then started to make dots with my pencil on it, starting in the middle. It was so beutiful to do something that simple. I tried just to be in the process. Not to think too much about the result, to work randomly. But offcourse that´s not easy to do. Your mind interfers all the time and wants to decide how the work is developing. If it felt meaningful or not changed all the time, as it in general does, both in life and art. It became for me a research and meditation on time, life and meaning, and made a change in how I think about and work with art. I felt like finding some solid ground to build on. I was excited to feel like being on a road that actually had a direction. Not knowing the path in detail or what would happen further on, but just knowing this was (really) something.
After this the work with dots continued into other projects, like This (Here We Are. Actually) and Something.
I regard Nothing and All as my artistic fundament.