ART-PRESENTATION: Torbjørn Rødland-First Abduction Attempt & Other Photographs
Torbjørn Rødland is a Los Angeles-based photographer who creates portraits, still lives and landscapes, which simultaneously inhabit, defamiliarise and disrupt the realm of the everyday. With an often fetishistic approach to subjects, objects and materials, Rødland produces photographs that are intense, conceptually playful and psychologically evocative.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Eva Presenhuber Gallery Archive
Torbjørn Rødland in his solo exhibition “First Abduction Attempt and Other Photographs” shows recent color photographs and his earlier video “Non-progress” (2006). At first glance Rødland’s work often inhabits the aesthetic space of commercial photography due the formal clarity and, at times, fetishistic approach to subjets, objects and materials. Recurring tropes within his images oranges, bananas, cakes and close-ups of body parts and related accessories, while viscous substances such as honey and paint drip over hs subjects. Rødland’s approach to image-making, using analogue photography in mostly staged scenarios, draws attention to the constructed nature of the image, while leaving open the potential for unexpected outcomes. That his images hold the viewer’s gaze is not only the result of a certain pleasure in the act of looking, but also the indirect, uncertain nature of their messages. As the artist states, his photographs aim to ‘keep you in the process of looking’. Each reveling in visual detail, eliciting an almost iconoclastic charge, the works in this exhibition continue to expose layers of pleasure and discomfort lurking beneath the surface of aesthetic experience. Created not according to, and not to be read according to, a single interpretive framework, Rødland’s images are rather dependent on a willingness to grapple with the diversity of life as a constantly evolving system, where physical phenomena, emotional reaction, and cultural exchange can shift and take precedence over one another at any given moment. The photograph from which the exhibition’s title is taken depicts a violent scene of a woman being dragged by her legs through a door. Sunlight pours across the back of her naked lower body as she is wrenched from the carpeted floor. It is at once an image of paralysis and poetics. Rødland’s looped video “Non-progress” (2006), shown in the lower level of the gallery demonstrates the artist’s approach to jokes: he wants to know what’s in them when they’re no longer funny, the video loops opposing seasons, places and times of day.
Info: Eva Presenhuber Gallery, 39 Great Jones Street, New York, Duration 4/11-22/12/17, Days & Hours: Tie-Sat 11:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, www.presenhuber.com