Sunday, January 19, 2020

HYPERBOREA - Freight + Volume Gallery



Freight+Volume is pleased to announce Hyperborea an exhibition of 
recent work by interdisciplinary artist Anne Katrine Senstad
Reflecting a deep engagement with various avant-garde movements, 
including the Neo-Concrete group of Brazil and California’s Light and
Space movement, Senstad’s work is underscored by a fixation with 
properties of form, sound and color, and specifically their overlap, 
the neurological phenomenon of “synesthesia”, wherein neural 
pathways signaling sensory experience are crossed and fused. 
In her first showing at the gallery, the artist presents a series of 
photographic works depicting precisely arranged, hard-edged 
planar forms along with neon sculptures and video installations; 
despite their apparent grounding in the realm of formal 
abstraction, Senstad’s pieces are set apart by an enigmatic, 
ethereal character and ephemerality that runs throughout 
her practice in all mediums. Working with the most elemental 
qualities of color, light and form, she corporealizes them into 
mirage-like objects that quiver between representation and 
perceptual experience, querying the inevitable slippage 
amongst our simultaneous systems of perception, sensory 
experience, and rational cognition.

















Senstad frequently works with text, and in Forget Flavin, first 
exhibited at the Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, she 
integrates her work with light and deconstruction of perception
 into an “ironic insult” to the established hierarchy of art history. 
The issue of the over-representation of male artists is of special 
significance to Senstad, who observes a particular dearth of 
female artists within the spheres of Minimalism, Land Art, and
 the Light and Space movement.

Eschewing LED lights and other artificial materials, Senstad has 

long used neon heavily in her practice, noting its uncanny formal 
qualities and literal otherworldly nature, existing in abundance in 
the earth’s atmosphere and outer space. Recalling the utopian, 
quasi-mystical roles and participatory models imparted upon 
abstract geometric constructions by artists throughout the 
20th century, perhaps best expressed in the "Manifesto of the 
Neo-Concrete," stating their desire to “use phenomenology to 
create art that expresses complex human realities”, as well as
 the experiments in sensory deprivation undertaken by Robert 
Irwin and other Light and Space movement artists, the works in 
Hyperborea transmute raw sensory data into evocative 
constructions that are often oddly specific and deja-vu like; 
regarding Beckoned to Blue and Red, two video installations 
in which flickering projections of grain and grit against modulating 
washes of color stimulate the movement of gaseous neon particles, 
Senstad notes their similarity to the “Prisoner’s Cinema” phenomenon, 
or when as a child, one would push their fingers against their eyes
 to produce dots and patterns. Senstad’s relationship with color is 
exacting, with particular tonal juxtapositions imparting a sort of 
ambient consciousness upon the works, further blurring the lines 
between abstraction, materiality, and reality, situating Hyperborea
 in a nether-space between the organic and artificial. 














Two freestanding neon sculptures, Portal for Perpetuity I and II
display the nuances of the artist’s illusive ability. Fashioned of 
neon and transparent mirrors, Senstad describes them as “inverted 
black holes”, objects of seemingly infinite expanse yet having restrained 
physical bounds. Their respective color pairings (one of red and 
blue neon, the other pink and yellow) amplify this notion of 
sheathed potential energy.

In her photo-based work, the artist explores similar overlaps between 

color and sensory perception. Depicting a hot pink gradient on a 
skewed plane, one piece from Senstad’s large-scale Color 
Kinesthesia series is on display; captured as a still from another 
video piece (the artist frequent recapitulates past formal devices), 
the hyper-saturated and gradated fuschia tones appear both 
reflective and diffusive, as if flickering between a physical 
photograph and a window cut to reveal a pink void. Similarly, 
an otherworldly inner energy emanates from her Concrete 
Planes series. Consisting of geometric arrangements of 
hard-edged triangular forms in carefully selected pairings of 
color, they call attention to the constant tension between 
physicality and perception, especially the atmospheric spaces 
and slippages between the two wherein the brain fills in its 
own hallucinatory simulacra. Organized into triptych and diptych 
formations, they reflect Senstad’s sensitivity to the fault lines of 
perception and illusion, as she weaves them into a discourse 
of color, light, and form.



A full-color, limited edition artist book will be available for purchase at the gallery or online

For more information, please contact nick@freightandvolume.com, ashley@freightandvolume.com, or call 212.691.7700