Image: Albin Ulvebring

REFLEKTOR

Degree exhibition of the Bachelor students in Fine Arts

Celestial bodies, constellations and zodiac signs. The sign and symbols, constructed for each artist creates a night sky which lifts the artists and their work to reach beyond the past and present.

Space curves and each portrait captured within its own frame and accompanied by pages of their work - acts as a force, where the artist and the work undulate, flexes, curves and twists into our minds and bodies. The artists and the works are not contained within an invisible rigid infrastructure but are held in the very material of space - immersed in a gigantic flexible shell.

The observer finds their own entryway and throughlines: a set of meanings that are dependent on each observer’s position, both spatially and personally, as they and the work become part of shifting constellations. For millennia people have gazed at the stars to conjure myths that make sense of the world around them – evidenced in objects that span from the Nebra sky disc from 1800 BCE to modern day astrological charts.

Planets circle around the sun and things fall because space curve.

A reflector, shapes light and when used as an optical instrument, such as a telescope, it is designed to make distant objects appear nearer - formed of curved mirrors and lenses, where rays of light are collected and focused with the resulting image magnified. And so, we enter each image and word-image presented with a magnified view that allows the artist equal weight to inhabit this world of changing views.

But it isn’t only space that curves; time does too.

Each work is stained with the histories of the Northern Swedish winter - the urban and rural landscapes and the endless light of summer. The birches, conifers and trees hold a stately position in winter’s deep snow, the horizon’s line alters daily depending on the thaw or snowfall. This line, this place by which you orient yourself in the Northern landscape, is constantly changing — there is always movement, there are always shifts. This can be transposed to how we look or experience images and art, to the perspectival space between what is foregrounded and what is not - in the landscape they hold a timely place, an oneiric depth, which, in this very grasping, diminishes and dissolves what is in front and behind.

We visit the spaces, lines and images of Reflektor - activating works – archival, political, conceptual and material where contact as sensation is part of the world of light. Each artwork, no matter the medium is a physical act, a living entity, a kinetic reciprocal touching while negotiating, proximity, distance, tightening or softening, with laughter, melancholy, anger, joy or irony. These artistic celestial bodies are varied, investigations into form and content, imbued with an intensity of making and thinking, thinking and making - breathing a responsibility into carving out image-worlds that resonate with time and change.

Space cannot stand still. The whole of space expands and contract. Colourful worlds where universes explode, space collapses into bottomless holes, time sags and slows near a planet and the unbounded extensions of interstellar space ripple and sway like the surface of the sea. This is our reality.

Edith Marie Pasquier

* The italic text are abridged quotes from Seven Brief Lesson on Physics, Carlo Rovelli, 2014

The exhibition opens 10 May and can be seen in and around the premises of the Academy.
The exhibition is open until 26 May.