Rogaland Kunstsenter is proud to present new works in Sandra Vaka Olsen's first institutional solo exhibition. Vaka Olsen is an artist in the process of establishing herself internationally, and has long worked with analogue photography.
In the exhibition you see how Vaka Olsen challenges the technical process of photography by manipulating the exposures. Here the artist uses sunscreen to make marks with her body on the sheet before it is developed, creating an entirely new photographic image that can range from sensual to muddy. With her body she creates imprints and blocks the light that produces what we traditionally know as photography – much in the same way we use sunscreen to protect ourselves from harmful sun rays, the sunscreen protects the paper from the light.
The photographs show computer screens that have had liquid spilled on them and are in danger of being ruined, or they are close-ups of towels we use to dry off on the beach after a swim, or to soak up liquid. The images are framed in plexiglass boxes that have also been marked on the surface, following the same logic the artist applies to the photographs. Vaka Olsen's interventions point to entropy – that nothing lasts forever – even though photography and technology are often used to document what is transient. Body, technology, preservation and entropy run as themes throughout the rest of the exhibition.
Installations of bent and straight plexiglass tubes in cylinders filled with liquid, metals and other materials are ornamented with eyelashes, as if they were bodily. A kind of container with references to the eye and the body. The artist sees the body as a container both for matter, but also for memories, sounds, feelings and immaterial things.
Sandra Vaka Olsen was educated at the art academies in Copenhagen and Oslo, at the University of Oslo and at Rogaland Kunstskole. After her studies in Copenhagen, she has been based there and in Berlin, with artist residencies in New York and soon Paris. Vaka Olsen has also curated exhibitions, as part of the artist-run space TOVES in Copenhagen, and among others Oil On Calming Water Effect, shown at Skur2 in Stavanger in 2012.
The exhibition and production are supported by Statens utstillingsstipend, Vederlagsfondet, and Statens Værksteder for Kunst.
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Detail of Sandra Vaka Olsen's photograph