STATEMENT
I am a multi-disciplinary artist with an interest in vision and perception. I work with light, glass and site-specific installations. I am currently developing work using film and sound. Starting points for my practice are sites and materials that work as the portals to stories hiding within. This allows me to connect my work to the particularities of place and community, to listen and be in a dialogue, and develop specific works out of that exchange.
My work started from interest in light as a medium and particularly as a means by which the artist can edit visual perception. From there, I have moved into exploring how we see the world in a particular way not because of how the world is but because of how we are. Much of what we see is pre-edited into our perception without our conscious awareness
of the process.
That raises a couple of questions. First, how does the selection happen? Part of the explanation is that experience produces expectation that shapes visual perception at a pre-awareness level. We see what we expect to see until and unless something goes wrong and the incoming data do not fit our expectations. I want to challenge that precarious balance and create something that dislodges expectations to make us see
in a different way.
And then, how can we see the history that animals, objects and matter carry, and re-navigate the world as if from their point of view? Glass, with which I work a lot, often re-cycled window glass, is a rich medium with which to explore this, because of the extraordinary and often un-noticed qualities of glass as a material, which is made from sand, to which it can never return. It is crucial for us; we use it all the time and see through it, but we don’t normally see it.
My practice increasingly reflects a perspective where we revalue and rethink our position in nature. How can we work with what is there without dominating it? How to see and listen to what is there and make it visible and noticeable without owning it? I want to move from the known and comfortable perspectives and destabilise the foundation by trying to find the new point of view.
I want to try to work with a more equal relationship where the human centred perspective is challenged. Nowhere is the human more challenged than if we think about Deep Time – a geological term that encourages us to think in epochal terms covering millions of years. Alongside that, I have used the term Deep Space, not just so we see ourselves as cosmic specks of dust, but also so we reflect on space, locations and their many layers of realities in history and stories.
Deep Time Deep Space helps me a keep a wider perspective on time, place, objects and issues and encourages me to attempt to think and work simultaneously on micro- and macro-scales.
This is part of what is reflected in the project platform Uncertainty Lab, which, as a concept, also centralises fluid collaboration. The idea is to try new working processes
and production structures and to acknowledge that our work is a journey of exploration through hard-to-define questions towards unknown answers. As a platform for site-specific work, focusing on the unseen and untold, aiming to work across disciplines, Uncertainty Lab is an opportunity for cooperating with others. It is a starting point for dialogues, discussions and journeys through layers of realities of history, nature and experience. It starts with what is already there.
It doesn't all have to fit together in a neat way. Uncertainty Lab wants to
see what happens in the space inbetween, where the different stories meet or collide.
Nature is our core reference point. The inbetween that is incompletely seen is the beginning of our perception. Our open-ended commitment to an open-minded journey
is the first step.
© 2023 | ÅSA FRANKENBERG