NYAB Event - Lovisa Ringborg "If your secret was an animal what animal would it be"

Lovisa Ringborg "If your secret was an animal what animal would it be"

HSF

This event has ended.

Swedish artist Lovisa Ringborg exhibits at HSF two interrelated works. A photograph, Insomnia is the visual and conceptual counterpart of an environmental piece, If Your Secret Was an Animal What Animal Would It Be, which consists of four photographs and a mirror text. More than doing photographs, Ringborg literally works with photography: her initial photographic shots, used as “raw material” (the artist’s words), are digitally altered and combined into carefully composed and theatrically staged images. As with Caravaggio (a rough mattress hardly visible under classical draperies), the fictionality of the represented scene is revealed in her work, and the masquerade in the artist’s studio emerges interfering with the subject matter. Subtle visual inconsistencies insinuate unreliability in the faux staged-photographs and add surreal echoes to their content. But there is no attempt on shocking effects: no juxtaposition of evidently incongruous images and meanings. If the sleep of Goya’s reason produced monsters, the inoffensive stuffed animals that Ringborg photographed at the Museum of Natural History, are turned into the elementary vocabulary of a potentially monstrous language. A language from which narrative is removed and humans, beasts, and objects are kept frozen on the threshold between familiar anxieties and uncanny premonitions.