GINNUNGAGAP
Recent Work by Sigrid Sandström
May 26 – SepteMber 10, 2006

Through dramatic shifts in scale, complex surface treatments, and projected film, Sigrid Sandström examines the relationship of exploring bodies to explored spaces, whether as an encounter between an adventurer and uncharted territory or a viewer and an artwork. Her powerful images question how we construct and understand the nature of Nature and our emotional and physical ties to it.

The raw material for many of Sandström’s explorations is the landscape of her home country, Sweden, as well as Norse mythology. A series of paintings in this exhibition is based on Ginnungagap, the mythological place—located between the eternal lands of fire and ice—where life began.

Sandström’s artwork can be linked historically to artists who infused representations of their native lands with symbolic meaning. These include the Scandinavian Symbolist painters, the Canadian Group of Seven, the German Romantics, and the Hudson River School artists. Like the archetypes she invokes, Sandström explores the many ways we experience the quest for the unknown and invites us to contemplate our own physical and psychological relationships to the landscapes of our desire.
 
Exploring Bodies, Explored Spaces

In this series of twenty-four paintings, Sandström’s varied material choices and paint application create visual shifts between opacity and transparency that orchestrate an interactive viewing experience. Matte planes obscure the viewer’s body; reflective areas highlight it. In an intimate painting, the reflection of a viewer’s eye might all but overwhelm an ice floe; in a painting of grander scale, a viewer’s body might seem small and insignificant.

The series forms the basis of a one-second looped film, each painting visible for only one twenty-fourth of a second. One’s experience of the filmic rush of this visual and temporal instability differs greatly from the more concrete bodily relationship to the paintings, viewed individually and at one’s own pace. It is in this orchestration of viewer experience, in the sophisticated play of exploring bodies and explored spaces, that Sandström plunges us most deeply into different aspects of the same fictional place.
 
A Stranded Kite

The conceptual jumping-off point for Sandström’s multimedia sculpture Hargrave’s Commitment is the box-kite invented by Lawrence Hargrave (1850–1915). An Australian pioneer, inventor, explorer, mason, and astronomer, Hargrave devoted much of his life to constructing a flying machine. He was responsible for at least three crucial aeronautical concepts that were incorporated into the earliest successful airplanes: the cellular box-kite wing, the curved wing surface, and the thick leading wing edge (aerofoil). A supporter of open communication within the scientific community, Hargrave did not patent his inventions, and instead published the results of his experiments, assisting subsequent aeronautical pioneers including Orville and Wilbur Wright, Alberto Santos-Dumont, and Gabriel and Charles Voisin.

Hargrave’s refusal to patent his inventions and his commitment to the free exchange of ideas made him an idealistic and romantic figure for Sandström. In Hargrave’s Commitment, Sandström retools the inventor’s box-kite as a tent—a temporary shelter from the elements as well as a hideout. Addressing Sandström’s thematic interest in remote possibilities, the drive to stake claims in uncharted, territory and failed utopias, Hargrave’s Commitment includes neatly stacked provisions and a looped projection that endlessly replays an explorer’s attempt to claim a remote site.

Opposite Hargrave’s Commitment is a meticulously painted rendering of wood grain. The vertical panel openly mocks the impermanence of the installation’s canvas tent and alludes to stronger domiciles built to last. Painted on paper, the wood grain actually has no more purchase on permanence than the canvas structure does, and stands as a perfect metaphor for the utopian quest of exploration.

Robin Held Chief Curator Director of Exhibitions and Collections Frye Art Museum