Artist: Kim Hiorthøy
Venue: STANDARD (OSLO)
Exhibition Title: Take it From The Field
Date: February 12 – March 12, 2016
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of the artist and STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo. Photos by Vegard Kleven.
Press Release:
“The art of a chair is not its resemblance to art, but is partly its reasonableness, usefulness and scale as a chair.”
— Donald Judd
“It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa.”
— Pierre Boulez
When, after deciding to go for a walk or to seek out a friend who lives some way away, one suddenly finds oneself lost in wilderness, it is not uncommon to try and find a high place from which to get a better vantage point. Arriving there, one might find oneself surprised at how things look from greater distance.
Not only do objects seem to change both in shape and color when seen from afar, they also then appear smudged in with their surroundings, which might change our understanding of what they are, or make us lose sight of them altogether. The next thing then—equally confusing or clarifying—is to somehow project oneself into this landscape and make a kind of abstract map in the head to help in finding one’s way back (or one’s way onward).
Another useful tool to navigate by when lost, is to use what is often called ‘common knowledge’. It can be tricky to know what is and what isn’t ‘common knowledge’, but if you’ve spent some time with other people—preferably people from a different background than your own—it usually works to just not think about it too much and make assumptions. A bigger problem arises when—after obtaining some confirmation that what you assume to be common knowledge is assumed to be common knowledge also by your fellow woman or man—you yourself begin to question why this thing or that, is considered common knowledge and not something else entirely.
We look at things and agree or disagree about what they are based on, what each of us has seen and learned from before. If a person (or an animal) doesn’t understand what we mean, we can try to explain by way of illustration or simplification. If the explanation requires too many concessions to be made, due either to a lack of knowledge in the explainee or a lack in our ability to explain, the explanaition itself might go astray and lead to something else. Either to something we thought we knew but realize we didn’t, or to something we thought we didn’t know but realize we do. Or, it just becomes a rubbish explanation.
Kim Hiorthøy (b. 1973, Trondheim) lives and works in Berlin, Oslo and Brussels. Previous exhibitions include Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, “14th Vilnius Painting Triennial: False Recognition”, CAC, Vilnius; “Sonic Voices, Rocking Hard”, Montevideo / Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst, Amsterdam; “The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing”, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art – MIMA, Middlesbrough; “The Line Is a Lonely Hunter”, New Jerseyy, Basel. This year will also see Hiorthøy’s debut as a director with the full-length feature film, Løperen og hesten.