Shadow Play
Almost There
Märit Aronsson
Babel, March 28-April 6, 2008

In her exhibition Almost There Märit Aronsson presents a geographical and mental journey. Via the dark Swedish forests and the slopes of naked rock in Lofoten, it takes us to the abstract reality of maps. By making use of the journey metaphor, she includes our fear and sense of insecurity, our anticipations and the comfort we derive from reaching a goal. More important than the physical journey is the inner one, a journey that is reflected in all aspects of our life. All the time we are confronted with the fact that we do not know what may meet us around the next bend. And yet we press ahead, driven by some indefinable force.

Aronsson’s works touch important aspects of human existence. This time she has changed the floor of the exhibition room, the fundament of our physical actions. The solid ground beneath our feet represents a factor in our daily lives that we cannot do without. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” – but first we shall tread upon earth and dust all the days of our lives. And yet, most of the time we do not pay much attention to this element. By assigning a voice of its own to the floor, a voice that has been missing for so long, Aronsson adds a new dimension to the room. All of a sudden, the most ignored surface of the white cube has addressed the audience. It speaks to us by means of a rhythmic interplay of lines, contour lines that belong to the realm of geography. Confronted by her carefully recorded terrain of islands and ocean we become ignorant of our own size and in danger of losing ourselves in the landscape.

This fear is reflected in several of her works. Apparently, we humans share a more or less universal fear of getting lost in the woods, of not finding our way in spite of the map we have brought along, or, more generally, of vanishing without a trace from the society in which we try to be included. A map is a visual representation of this fear. It shows an almost naïve attempt to comprehend the world around us. According to Kant, the interplay between imagination and reason will inevitably become a source of conflict when it faces immensity, as experienced in natural forces. This, he says, is what calls forth a sense of the sublime. But, on the other hand, there are many examples that show that it may also create a need in us to master these great natural forces.

Visualization is one of the strategies we have developed to make our surroundings less frightening, and maps may be seen as an abstract, graphical, slightly more tangible world. Aronsson’s work Map underlines this human tendency by making the world of maps even more abstract and by giving the map an aesthetically exciting form.

Generally, man fears what he cannot see. This feature is well exploited by the creators of horror films. What may lurk in the shade, behind the trees, at dusk, affects us more than horrible monsters in broad daylight. Aronsson’s photos have borrowed many of their visual effects from this genre. We see shadows, shapes that stand out against the background, but that we cannot quite make out. The Liquid Light technique creates a particular sense of nearness to the images, images that appear more organic than ordinary photos. It is all about pieces, rapid cuts, glimpses and details. We get the bits, but the artist never gives us the totality, and this is what gives the images their particular quality and makes us fascinated. They are charged in the meeting between recognisable elements and that which we can only guess. The artist has created moments of horror film poetry. At the same time, the images function perfectly as autonomous graphical works, as meditations over form.

In Aronsson’s works, we are surrounded by nature; in its raw, pristine forms on the canvases, and refined by humans into cultural forms on the floor. In the film Lines in the Air she lifts us up into the element of air as we follow the dance of electrical cables across a cloudy sky. Whether it is in a film, on a canvas, by means of the graphical language of lines on the floor or in the format of the book, Aronsson’s theme remains our relationship to nature, and, by extension, our role in the world. She challenges us to place ourselves in the world through finding our position on the map. However, she also allows us to get lost and lose ourselves in the abstraction of lines. We are still on our way, anyway. Not yet arrived, but almost there.

©Kristin Mandt Heim
Translated by Birgit Kvamme Lundheim