Anne Katrine Senstad

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

IMMERSIVE WORLD - a new Arts and Culture series in 10 episodes that was first aired on Arte 1 TV in Brazil in November 2019 - and will be shown on All Arts TV, a New York PBS station in March and April 2020. The series is streamed nationwide in the US free of cost after the published date of each episode.

As part of Immersive World my work is presented in Episode 9, April 18th, 2020 showing works from my sculptural light environment installation series that has been exhibited in New York at SL Gallery (2019) , in Saudi Arabia (2018) alongside James Turrell, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Robert Irwin and Leo Villarreal in partnership with Pace Gallery and Cruz-Diez foundation), and in Estonia at Kai Art Center and upcoming in Norway(fall 2020) and is featured in the TV Series alongside Dan Flavin/DIA Art Foundation, Anthony McCall, The New Museum and more.

Created and produced by NYC based Producing Partners.