HØVDINGENS KJÆRE SQAW FÅR LITT
PIZZA I MEXICO BY —THE QUICK BROWN
FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG

artists: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Andrea Bakketun, Sara Korshøj Christensen, Nils Norman, Slavs and Tatars, Allyce Wood

From curator Martina Petrelli:

Language shapes culture. Changing in accordance with social factors, language has variations. Leaving traces and charged with meanings, variation is not a problem—rather a feature. Hence, in a high-speed ever-changing world, how can we deepen our understanding of language —therefore, of structures of culture?

The 2019 program at Akershus Kunstsenter presented an exhibitions’ base-thematic on structures, wishing to reflect on the mechanisms affecting choices, values, and tendencies in society—tying the past to the present, dealing with identity and cultural heritage. As the last exhibition of the year, The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog calls into question the structures of existing languages. The exhibited works by Slavs and Tatars, Allyce Wood, Andrea Bakketun, Nils Norman, Sara Korshøj Christensen, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan guide the visitor through spoken, gestural and silent traces of (hi)stories—leading to a multifaceted investigation of communication.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is both the exhibition title and a pangram, a sentence including all the letters of the alphabet. The exhibition encourages a revisionary understanding of language, how it is experienced, its intrinsic cognitive value—and the consequent emphasized the agency of contemporary artistic creation.

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In Allyce Wood’s tapestries, digital and handmade processes are merged. Mediating on- and offline- experiences, the artist codifies old and new symbols to reconfigure messages for processing new meanings. Wood’s work also investigates our understanding of “hand-made”—claiming that, as machines are also made by humans, there’s a gap in our approach towards digital processes. With such discourse, she approaches the loom as a mediator between traditional and computerized technologies and develops installations which hint to recreating digital experiences IRL (In Real Life).

Wood speaks about her tapestries as a collaboration between herself and the (weaving) machine, and shifts focus between materiality and expressivity. Changes of thread patterns can be observed in the works, as well as research on optical color-mixing as the proximity of threads creates new color-tones. At Akershus Kunstsenter, Wood is experimenting with a new type of installation: the tapestries overlap and multiply hyperlinking between them, imitating panel-windows opening on a computer screen.

The weaving of the two exhibited installations Arching, floating vision and alum and Parallel circles shine, through the grasp, in my eyes start with processes of photography and image treatment in Photoshop. Next, is the translation of the artist’s images in pixel-codes, series of zeros (0) and ones (1) which construct an image that the loom can read. Wood talks about those parallel language processes as translations of her VR (Virtual Reality) and RL (Real Life) space experiences. Additionally, the texts in the works include poetry, keywords, and symbols from Wood’s SMS chats— recycling communication and keyboard elements she touches in her every day. Those are combined with references to weaving techniques, comparing the experience of technological spaces to the ones of life.

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all photos credit to Istvan Virag