Skyggesider (Shadows) - Vida Aasen & Ebbe Arneberg
Skyggesider (Shadows)
Text: Eira Solvang Photo: Kevin Fauske
The exhibition Skyggesider by Vida Aasen and Ebbe Arneberg was in SKOG from 11 May to 11 June 2023. Pricelist here.
Through rigid geometric reliefs and figurative animal sculptures, Ebbe Arneberg and Vida Aasen explore the basis of our occasionally contradictory experience of existence. What particularly concerns them, is how our understanding of something is dependent upon the perspective one adopts as a spectator. Despite different approaches to their common material, a technical kinship is immediately revealed: They both choose to embrace the effect of the unglazed surface, which absorbs light and gives the clay object a saturated appearance –not unlike the effect of an accidental or intentional shading.
(Photo: Kevin Fauske)
The animal and its relationship to man is a recurring theme in Vida's artistic practice. This exhibition is based on species that in both a figurative and literal sense reside in the shadows of human activity. Badgers, hedgehogs, rats, snails; creatures that are mainly active in the darkness of night or dimlight parts of the city, appear both as individual sculptures and in clusters composed of animal bodies. These are not created based on reference photos, but rather the animal as it appears in Vida's memory -as shadows of her recollections.
Vida Aasen. (Photo: Kevin Fauske)
Ebbe's project revolves around delineations of more concrete and less fleeting shadows: It is the outline of previous works that forms the basis for the shape of the wall-mounted reliefs. By photographing the sculpture from different angles, Ebbe reduces the three-dimensional object to its constituent lines. The schematised outline is fixed in the reliefs and the sculpture is removed; in the absence of the ceramic object, it is as if only the shadows of the original form remain.
Ebbe Arneberg. (Photo: Kevin Fauske)
Whilst Vida's recollections form the basis of her depictions of the urban environment's unlit species, Ebbe's clay tablets are based on a remediation of a previous work. They both provide a perspective on a more or less tangible fulcrum, thus creating an entry point to what lies on one of the many shadowy sides of existence.
Vida Aasen. (Photo: Kevin Fauske)
