Anne Senstad - Dan Flavin - 2 Person show

SOLIVAGANT

Anne Senstad

Soft Geometry Liquid Commodity

Nov 12 – Dec 13 2015

Opening Nov 13 - 6-8 pm with a performance by French artist Patrice Lerochereuil at 7 pm.

Solivagant* 

54 Orchard street,

NYC, 10002 

Solivagant* is pleased to announce a solo show by New York based, Norwegian artist Anne Senstad.

The multi-location installation Soft Geometry-Liquid Commodity presents a series of new geometric and text based neon works that suggest a route running through Solivagant* gallery space and the city block hosting it; the gallery will physically expand from its 79 sq.ft room to the whole block between Orchard St., Hester St., Allen St. and Grand St.

Anne Senstad’s site-responsive installation aims to comment on and highlight the role of Chinatown as a cultural antecedent to New York and as one of its last bastions of authenticity. Solivagant*, as an intervening exhibition space stitched into the fabric of the local trade, investigates the value and experience of art by placing it outside of the conventional gallery context; taking it back to an informal trade space, and to its manufacturing place of origin.

Lighting systems, neon signs and displays are largely present in Chinatown cityscape. Soft Geometry creates a correspondence of light, shapes, text and color between the different displays along the city block, a cartographic and aesthetic anthropological intervention.

Liquid Commodity reflects ideas of trade, business, service industry and fast movement of commodities that we find in the market place and in the neighborhood. Art exists as commodity and currency, illuminating and directing desires to possession and consumerism. With the seduction of colors, neon lights and the object-art, commodification and trade is demystified and exposed.

The exhibition at Solivagant* will be accompanied by a number of collaborative performances in response to Senstad’s installations, starting with performance artist Patrice Lerochereuil culminating in saxophonist Ilhan Ersahin’s site responsive sound performance for the closing event on December 12^th.  French-American artist Patrice Lerochereuil's (b. 1957) practice is particulary close in spirit to the 60's fluxus movement. He is co-curator of "Blago Bung", an international performing night in New York and Zurich. Musician, composer and producer Ilan Ersahin is founder of Nublu in New York and Istanbul amongst numerous other projects internationally.

Anne Senstad works in the multidisciplinary intersections of installation art, photography, video, site specificity and land art. Her work is concerned with sensorial aesthetics, perceptive and transformative ideas of art and philosophical practice and social-political awareness. She has exhibited widely internationally, chiefly at the 55^th and 56^th Venice Biennale, The Bruges Art and Architecture Triennale 2015,  Zendai Moma, Shanghai, Abu Dhabi Art Hub, ISEA Dubai, UAE in 2014 as well as in numerous private galleries, festivals and institutions.

Solivagant* is an Art Project Space measuring exactly 79sq.ft, located in the heart of New York CIty's Lower East Side. As a platform for experimentation and contemporary practices, it invites artists to work site-specifically, through public interactions, community involvement, installations and performances. Cultural Nomadism, contamination of productions and hybridism of ideas are the fundamentals of Solivagant*’s projects. 

Artworks are on view daily from 9am to 7pm through the Gallery’s window. Gallery space opens by appointment and during performances. Documentation of exhibitions can be accessed 24/7 online at solivagantnyc.com.

Soft Geometry, 2015 by Anne Senstad, Neon, transformer, plexiglas. 
16x16 inches, edition of 3.

Liquid Commodity, 2015 by Anne Senstad, Neon, transformer, plexiglas. 
16x16 inches, edition of 3.

GOLD GUIDES ME

GOLD GUIDES ME - by Anne Katrine Senstad. Commissioned by Bruges Art and Architecture Triennale. May 20 - Oct 18th 2015.

Led lights, yes slow plexiglas, aluminum, scaffolding. Size: 22 meters x 2m x 60 cm.

Gold Guides Me is part of Senstad's research project Capitalism in the public realm, and created especially for The Bruges Art and Architecture Triennale. Curated by Till-Holger Borchert, Lies Coppens, and Michel Dewilde.

http://www.triennalebrugge.be/en

Photo by Sarah Bauens 

Photo by Anne Senstad

Partial curatorial text: Bruges Contemporary Art and Architecture Triennial 2015 Bruges as a megapolis 20 May – 18 October 2015 Every year, over five million people visit Bruges. What if they all decided to stay? What would it mean for a preserved, historic city like Bruges to become an overnight megapolis? This is the premise for the Bruges Contemporary Art and Architecture Triennial 2015, a major event on the arts calendar. Eighteen international artists create new works that form an art trail through the city centre. These works reflect on the future and the creative potential of the city, on urbanisation, citizenship, lifestyle, community, finance and economics. Three indoor exhibitions form the opportunity to further explore and contextualise these topics. Bruges is transformed into URB EGG: the Triennial cracks the egg of Bruges in order to reinvent the city from the inside out. 
http://www.biennialfoundation.org/.../the-2015-bruges.../"

Documentation videos fromThe Vanity of Vanities - 56th Venice Biennale

Documentation videos from the immersive installation The Vanity of Vanities by Anne Senstad at El Magazen Dell'Arte on the occasion of the 56th Venice Biennale. The exhibition consisted of two spaces with sound, video and suspended plexiglas presenting the pieces The Vanity of Vanities and The Swamp.

Music composed and performed by JG Thirlwell.

Curated by Roberta Semeraro

Organized by ROSAM

In partnership with Zhulong Gallery, PNEK.org, Mutualart.com, Kunstforum.as, Apt Global and MAAP

Silver emerging rocks - Land intervention

Land intervention - Silver spray painted marble rocks placed in marble boulder and emerging from under leaning marble slab, created during the artist residency The Marble House Projects in Dorset, Vermont, 2015.

1000 Pounds of Calligraphy

1000 pounds of Calligraphy - Words set in stone - Arabic text carved into Marble: "Hope Guides Me", extracted from the book The Consolation of Philosophy/De consolatione philosophiae by Boethius, (480–524 AD). Submerged into a natural marble pool as a permanent installation. Produced during artist residency at The Marble House Project in Vermont, July 27-August 14, 2015. 40 x 10x 4 inches.

Measuring 100 Tons of Marble - Land Intervention

A Land intervention / Land organization installation by Anne Senstad at The Marble House Artist Residency in Dorset, Vermont. 

Title:  "Measuring 100 tons of Marble". Performed and installed July 31, 2015 during my Artist residency at Marble House Projects. The large marble blocks are remains of the historic industrial marble quarry in Vermont. 

The idea and act of "Measuring" land, mass and mountains is a response to our relationship with nature and represents displacement of our relationship with natural systems of living, having become hybridized societies embracing the artificial and gentrified. This work is simultaneously informed by the language of sculpture, land intervention, site specificity and installation art relating to and inspired by nature, well as an abstract/minimal concept conditioned art practices. 
There is a basic human need to organize nature, control the wild, aquire - as well as need for production through industry, such as for building houses and food production. Bi products of industrial actives in nature, can be found in stacking, linear or circular organization and pattern making, and can have an aesthetic value when extracted from its origin through imagery, site intervention or sculptural representation. The desire to create the mark of human possession can be found in visual representation through the aesthetics of farming of land with linear crop patterns and organization of landscape, marble quarry industrial manufacturing creating deep engravements into mountains and stacking of large marble blocks into immeasurable tons of natural sculptural forms.
Measuring the unknown, or here, innumerable mass of weight in nature with pink bonds, is an impossible and absurd task with no beginning and no end and relates to ideas of impermanence, timelessness and ideas of mass as illusion. The identification of placement and form of the massive marble blocks are highlighted by human intervention as a creative act. By amplifying lines in nature, wrapping stone in artificial pink bonds and using site as white cube creates an art form where one alters the sensation of experience and viewing conditions of the work and the action back into the authenticity of the original idea. The artwork is not displaced, it is placed.