Thinking Things into Being (excerpt from catalogue text)
© Taru Elfving

Watching the world move by – from a moving vehicle or in a video projection – its rhythm allows us to forget ourselves, or, more precisely, to forget the distinction between ourselves and the world we inhabits. We get immersed in the pattern and the tempo that the world has taken. We may become lost in thought that follows the movement, that moves along with the view. With Märit Aronsson’s flip-book of trees we can literally take part in this movement and set it in motion with our fingers. When looking out of a window of an airplane or down from a ski-lift, our gaze and thoughts follow the land and its contours in a subtle yet profoundly embodied experience. It is like meditation that instead of detaching the mind from the world merges the two together. In her videos everything is in a slow but certain motion and the source of movement or perspective is uncertain. We move with the landscape, in proximity to it. In this space of proximity, between us and the scene, things gain their own life, or seem to come to life. The windswept cover of a car performs for us, the path in a rugged landscape leads us somewhere. There is no end or beginning, the event of moving gains significance in itself.

As our eyes skim with the camera over a velvety black fabric covered in leafy patterns the surface suddenly gives in and turns into leaves floating on dark water. The focus on patterns – also in Aronsson’s drawings that appear to trace e.g. the outlines of scattered small islands or decorative surfaces of tree bark– lingers in between: between abstraction and form, or in ceaseless state of emergence, in the process of seeing and imagining otherwise. Here mapping doesn’t schematise the world into readable fixed forms. Instead it seems to be here a mode of redrawing or translation that gives life to the objects of study and unsettles any presumptions we may have of them.