Ginnungagap: Recent Work by Sigrid Sandström

Monday, 05 June 2006 16:22

Seattle, WA - Sigrid Sandström’s art explores the various ways we claim land (linguistically, mythically, or physically), as well as the motivations for such claims (exploration, property, sense of self, manifest destiny).  The raw material for these explorations is the landscape of her home country, Sweden, as seen in the thirty-two paintings, sculptures, projected works, films and works on paper in Ginnungagap: Recent Work by Sigrid Sandstrom, on view at the Frye Art Museum until Sept. 10, 2006, and curated by Frye Chief Curator Robin Held.

In Ginnungagap, a series of twenty-four paintings with varied material choices and paint applications creates visual shifts between opacity and transparency, orchestrating an interactive viewing experience.  Matte planes obscure the viewer’s body; reflective areas highlight it.  In an intimate painting, the reflection of a viewer’s eye might all but overwhelm an ice floe; in a painting of grander scale, a viewer’s body might seem small and insignificant.

Also on view is a film in which each of the paintings appears as a single frame in the span of one second.  The rapid rush of images (one twenty-fourth of a second per image) punctuates and compresses the expansive vastness shared by the paintings.  Exhibited together, the film and the paintings address different aspects of the same fictional place.

For the exhibition title, Sandström borrows a term from Norse mythology. Ginnungagap translates to “seeming emptiness,” the primordial void separating Niflheim, the land of eternal ice and snow, and Muspell, the land of eternal heat and flame.  According to legend, over time, water poured into Ginnungagap and froze, forming a sheet of ice.  Some of the ice later melted, creating a zone of meltwater around the ice and snow.  Here, Sandström relates, time began.

Sandström’s artwork can be linked historically to artists who infused representations of their native lands with symbolic meaning.  These include the Scandinavian Symbolist painters, the Canadian Group of Seven, the German Romantics, and the Hudson River School painters.  Like the archetypes she invokes, Sandström explores the multiplicity of ways we experience the quest for the unknown and invites us to contemplate our own physical and psychological relationships to the landscapes of our desire.

Born in Stockholm, Sweden, Sandström received her MFA from Yale University in 2001.  She currently lives in Red Hook, New York, where she teaches at Bard College, and Brooklyn, New York. Ginnungagap is accompanied by a full-color, 44-page exhibition catalogue, which is available in the Museum Store and online.

Visit the FRYE ART MUSEUM at : http://www.fryeart.org/