EXIT 07
Degree show at GL STRAND for students from the Art Academy in Copenhagen.


Transcendence: A Still Life
2007
Lambda print




The title of Transcendence: A Still Life takes point of departure in Gilles Deleuze’s last essay Immanence: A Life, in which he pleads for an encounter with the though about the transcendental, with verticality as a figure, and suggests a horizontal plane, where everything is immanent, inherent, and you do not ascend, but is both ‘both’ and ‘and’. The work tries to flip the thought of either a transcendental plane or an immanent plane upside down and have it all in one plane, on a vertical plane.
The image is a photograph of a classic still life, interpreted to point out the individual absorption in a ritual need, dinner for one. All the elements in the set-up are created, or found, based on the imagination of the negative. Like the black dish with black squid ink pasta and light blue whipped cream. After the shoot of the negative display the colours have been inverted in a photo editing program, so it’s a negative of a negative. The shadows are now spots of light and the reflexions are as taken out of an x-ray image. The image looks almost endowed with spirit, and reminds of documentation of spiritualistic séances, a ritual with just as much sense as the ingestion of a meal.

+ becomes – which is + and then everything is = two horizontal planes



Origami Unicorn
2007
Copy paper



Pieces of regular copy paper have been used to fold an origami unicorn, based on an original origami recipe found on the Internet, and immediately after the unicorn was unfolded. The origami unicorn holds a special place in science fiction history, as it plays a central role in understanding the conflict in Blade Runner, the 1982 dystopian science fiction movie, in which the hero is set out to terminate replicants, androids, but ends up falling in love with one of them. The movie questions existence itself, and even if our supposed human hero is indeed a replicant himself. Since replicants have a limited life span, only a few years, and are born as adults, their memories are constructions too. Our hero dreams of a unicorn, and in the final scene, a fellow investigator has placed a neatly folded origami unicorn on his doorstep, when he is about to elope with his replicant love.
The Origami Unicorn piece is a portrait of that hero, a blank sheet of copy paper sophisticatedly folded to form an icon of dreams and shortly after unfolded to show the construction of the dream, and the parts that was once united is separated and pinned to the wall like butterflies.



Enter Trance
2007
Ultraviolet light tubes




Ultraviolet light tubes are used to replace the regular light tubes, using the same fittings, at the entrance to the show. By replacing the white light, with the purple-blue light, the fittings become a sculptural element, suited for places housing contemporary art, a poor man’s Dan Flavin. The light that is emitted from the tubes has other qualities and cultural references, as the light with a short wavelength is both used at nightclubs, for revealing entrance stamps and enhancing the light from fluorescent materials, and by forensics, to reveal blood and semen. This revealing effect is meant as a symbolic, short glimpse of a parallel world to the outside, as you rush past to see art.