Soft Geometry Liquid Commodity - Anne Senstad

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-square-foot 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 the 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 for possession and consumerism. With the seduction of colors, neon lights and the art object, commodification and trade is demystified and exposed.

The exhibition at Solivagant* will be accompanied by two collaborative performances in response to Senstad’s installations, starting with Fluxus artist Patrice Lerochereuil on Friday, November 13 and culminating with saxophonist Ilhan Ersahin’s site-responsive sound performance for the closing event on Saturday, December 12.

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. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally, chiefly at the 55th and 56th Venice Biennale, The Bruges Art and Architecture Triennale 2015,  Zendai Moma, Shanghai, Abu Dhabi Art Hub, and ISEA Dubai, UAE in 2014, as well as in numerous private galleries, festivals and institutions. She is represented by Zhulong Gallery in Texas.

Solivagant* is an art project space measuring exactly 79 square feet, located in the heart of New York CIty’s Lower East Side. As a platform for experimentation of contemporary practices, it invites artists to work responsively and 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. 

For press inquiries please contact the gallery at info@solivagantnyc.com

Light Year - Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage

Light Year - Decomposing Hierarchies, curated by Sarah Walko. 
Nov 5th, 7-10 pm. A video projection exhibition on the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage, in DUMBO, New York. 

Screening of The Swamp, 2014 with sound composed and performed by renowned musician JG Thirlwell. The program runs in a loop from 7-10 pm. The video program includes the artists: Anne Senstad, Catherine Page Harris, Orit Ben‐Shitrit, Margeaux Walter, Jeannette Ehlers.

The Swamp was included in my solo exhibition The Vanity of Vanities at 
El Magazen dell'Arte during the 56th Venice Biennale, curated by Roberta Semeraro and organized by ROSAM, and additionally presented in the Safina Radio Project, a Venice Biennale Arte Eventi project curated by Anabelle de Gersigny and produced by Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, UAE, both part of the 56th Venice Biennale 2015. It was also part of the exhibition The Nature of Now, a satellite exhibition part of the New Orleans Biennial Prospect 3, 2014.

“Decomposing Hierarchies” is a publicly‐presented video art exhibition on the Manhattan Bridge anchorage that explores various approaches to striping systemic hierarchies. Whether between living species, value systems or race, all of these artists are examining our relationship with historically and culturally constructed hierarchies. Each artist is presenting work that confronts constructed pyramids and pecking orders. The descriptive “decomposing” is chosen as each of the artists is not only presenting the audience with a new reality of torn down hierarchies but they are doing so by pulling us through this transformation in a slow experiential way that emphasizes a natural and/or supernatural breakdown. The work points to the idea that these constructed hierarchies have been in a long state of decay, that they are far past serving us. We are watching their at times meditative and at times strange transmogrifying states of becoming, because what is being born out of these dead systems is yet to be fully seen. The decomposing also conjures the term “primordial soup” a proposed a theory of the origin of life on Earth through the gradual chemical evolution of molecules that contain carbon and the works address this decay as sacred and the very marrow of potential creation."

Sarah Walko, curator.

Anne Senstad at St Paul United Methodist Church

Dallas Aurora Oct 18th 2015

Multiple projections, sound and aroma - Sonoptic Parallels, 2014 by Anne Senstad. 39 mins loop. Sound composed by CC Hennix. The immersive installation at St Paul United Methodist Church was part of Dallas Aurora - a site specific electronic art festival in the Dallas Arts district.