PRESS RELEASE
On Eternities Tablets: Anne Katrine Senstad A Virtual Solo Exhibition Curated by Sarah Walko November 24 - February 28, 2021 VIDEO Link: Curatorial walk through with Sarah Walko HERE   
Joy Harjo Joy Harjo, the current poet laureate of the United States, writes a sets of instructions for the soul in her book of poems Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings. The spirit of myth and the subconscious in everything, her imagery of immense landscapes that fuse with the vast stretches of our hidden mind and the politics of being human through her own experience as an indigenous woman in the US. They float across lands and time in a way that parallels the visual works presented in this exhibition by Norwegian artist Anne Katrine Senstad. The exhibition brings together three bodies of work based on light, space and perception, and investigate interior and exterior horizons. The title is from a Norwegian poet and writer, Hans Børli whose poems Senstad recently found revisiting and drawing on that also traverse eternity, nature and the human condition during crisis. Elements III Blue is Senstad’s immersive light installation built of horizontal and vertical blue lights. A space both enclosed and open where the horizon in the distance is absent. Blue in nature makes us think of the sea and the sky. The experiential installation explores how light redefines a space, affects us from the physiological to the philosophical, how we define our “blue,” and define ourselves in vast placeless space. Senstad explains “I wanted to create a matrix of horizontal and vertical expressions of blue light, evoking fractal topologies. In space, distance is the present—the horizon extending far beyond our frame of reference as blue columns of light ascend to the empyrean. I wanted to interpret the idea of blue as a physical environment out of my own curiosity about the emotional, physiological, and scientific phenomena that constitute our concept of color and as we experience it. But also, one lifelong pursuit and desire in my work is to capture the impossible beauty and sensorial properties of color in the abstract.” Elements III Blue Video clip - to see the full 10 minute exhibition video piece with sound by C.C. Hennix, please visit the Open Art Advisory Vimeo page HERE Borealis Sculptures are Senstad’s color sculptures carrying notions of ephemerality that pervades all of her work but embedded now in a utilitarian plexiglass object of mass production. The shadows cast shades of blues, greens and whites onto the wall, dissolving planes and creating a sense that each piece is hovering just slightly from the surface. The compositions, form and color are minimalist but as you rotate around them new layers of transparent geometric colors create new forms and new colors. In their color, these sculptures reference the northern hemisphere, atmosphere, layers of ice in glaciers, mountains. “As a northern spherical phenomena the Aurora Borealis operates in electrically charged color compositions recorded in our retinal memory, evoking that of a stratospheric elusivity,” Senstad writes. “In these works, I can examine the relationship between ephemerality and spectral luminous shades within concrete planes. By harnessing it onto the physical surface, I objectify and materialize that which cannot be held and reorganize light and color into the folds of the physical. It plays with the transformation of the ephemeral into an entity and a phoneme shaping of time.”  Borealis no 010, 2020  Borealis No 020, 2020   Borealis No 030, 2020  Cosmosis Collages no 4A5C Composition 01, 2019 scale: 40 x 65 inches, edition of 6 Photographic C print from color film negative  Cosmosis Collages no 4A5C Composition B1B, 2019 scale: 40 x 65 inches, edition of 6 Photographic C print from color film negative  Cosmosis Collages no 4A530 Composition G1, 2019 scale: 40 x 65 inches, edition of 6 Photographic C print from color film negative Cosmosis Collages is the third final body of photographic works in this exhibition, developed in dialogue with the birth of Senstad's light sculpture installations Elements in 2018. The photographic works are conceptually and politically inspired by early 20th century movements such as the Suprematists and Constructivists. These aesthetics of utopian and scientific ideals that were deeply engaged in experiments in medicine, technology, philosophy, and psychology while simultaneously engaging in concepts of the cosmic universe. Practitioners sought deep spiritual alignment while experiencing the question what is it to be a being in a physical state and how can we master eternity, life, and mortality. The title, Cosmosis refers to the idea of experiencing oneness with the universe as a result of these investigations and experiments. Senstad was influenced by these philosophers who sought to conquer "eternity" and become immortal. Senstad explains: "It's been of a great interest to me to examine what drives human activities towards the desire for eternal life as part of my work on ethics and perception, which I find is much of the psychological central underpinnings of the very existence of society. The illusion of vanity can serve as fuel for a forward driving search for new scientific discoveries, creative inventions and technological developments when it is benevolent, yet when it exists as a negative force, it swings the pendulum to a series of unsupportive manifestations such as loss of moral compass, immense greed, and various forms of societal madness such as cultism. One can say that an understanding of internal freedom and oneness with the universe, as in the psychological and emotional state of cosmosis, in various religious and esoteric philosophies, is a form of true attainment of happiness or satisfaction, and is represented as a state of infinite euphoria, a purity of spirit and ecstatic rapture. In eastern thought, we see that the release from all human suffering, and configurations for the path towards ultimate liberation, is the very idea of wealth itself." We are living in a time of global pandemic, severe climate change crises deeply affecting our blue oceans and worldwide uncertainty of our future. A question that roams from literal to philosophical in all of Senstad’s work is simply where is there and where will there be solid ground to stand on? It is not a question that demands an answer. Like Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice on uncertainty “Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given to you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.” It is this journey through the universe that Senstad’s work takes us on to ultimately end up delivering us back to ourselves, facing our own horizons, within this massive universe in which we are connected to it all. It is a reminder to not carry the questions, but to live them into infinity.  Cosmosis Collages no 4A577 Composition 12, 2019 scale: 40 x 65 inches, edition of 6 Photographic C print from color film negative Cosmosis Collages 427.4A7 video sequence, 2020  Cosmosis Collage 427.4A7 – Composition no 204, 2018 Size: 32 x 44 inches. Edition of 6 Photographic C print from color film negative  Cosmosis Collage 6A42.2 – Composition no 1C2, 2018 Size: 32 x 44 inches. Edition of 6 Photographic C Print from collaged color film negatives  Left: Cosmosis Collage 4A531220 – Composition no 20, 2018 Size: 40 x 65 inches. Edition of 6 Right: Cosmosis Collage 4A52.1B.220 – Composition no 7B, 2018 40 x 65 inches. Edition of 6 Images courtesy of the artist.
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