Three solo exhibitions: Maria Rosenlöf, Erik Berglin, and Patrik Elgström

Maria Rosenlöf
Red is the Colour of Your Life
What is beautiful and useful in nature can also be dangerous. Åland’s bedrock consists almost entirely of red rapakivi granite. The landscape has an emotional, cultural, and economic value. However, rapakivi contains an elevated level of uranium. When uranium decays into radium, the radioactive noble gas radon is formed, which is odorless and colorless, enters indoors, and causes lung cancer.

Red is the Colour of Your Life moves in the field between the visible and what we cannot see. The project is about the significance of the place and choosing to continue living with something, or someone, even though we know it can be harmful to us.

In the gallery space, photographs from quarries are mixed with images of backs showing traces of the red gravel or disease that has affected them. In a video work, radon is also visualized through its emission spectrum, thus making the invisible visible.

Erik Berglin
The Bird Project 2006 – 2017
For 12 years, Erik Berglin worked on an extensive project that took him to a new city in the world each year. The project is based on a great interest in the public space and how wear and tear and collective expressions affect the aesthetics of urban spaces. Erik Berglin’s ambition was to add something to this through photographs of birds that were pasted up in the public space and then photographed. The world is bound together by the birds that move freely across national borders, and they are a natural element in our public spaces. In total, 5,000 different birds, all cut out by hand, have been put up, and in the exhibition, we get to see part of the documentation from the project. The working method is inspired by the ornithologist JJ Audubon, who in 1832, after 12 years of mapping North American birds, published Birds of America, where all the birds are depicted in natural size.

Patrik Elgström
GIHON RIVER
In the work GIHON RIVER, Patrik Elgström moves away from the urban space and instead turns to nature. The encounter with nature’s lack of intention in relation to the city’s planned and articulated space was an experience that shaped the work. The framework consists of a series of photographs that look down into the Gihon River. These were made during a residency in New England, USA, specifically the small community of Johnson in Vermont. The interest in seeing the landscape that Henry David Thoreau once saw and his book Walden led Elgström there in the fall of 2017. The work GIHON RIVER is an investigation of a limited piece of nature. Like Thoreau in Concord Massachusetts, where he measured Walden Pond, its depth and surface, Patrik Elgström followed Gihon River past Jesus Beach and out towards Lamoille River. In photographs of the river, Patrik Elgström tries to capture something that may not be there, a secret that he slowly moves around in his wanderings.

Program and activities

February 7, 5-8 PM
Opening

The exhibition is inaugurated by Krisyna Müller, head of operations, with the artists present.

February 7, 5-8 PM
Book release of GIHON RIVER in connection with the opening
In Patrik Elgström’s book, all photographs are analogously produced 8×10” contacts, text by Gertrud Sandqvist. The book is available for sale during the exhibition period.

February 12, 6-7 PM
Artist talk with Maria Rosenlöf
Based on the exhibition Red is the Color of Your Life, the artist talks with an invited guest about the landscape’s and nature’s impact on the human being who lives in it from a psychological perspective.

March 7, 2 – 3.30 PM
Talk about nature photography in the expanded field
Erik Berglin has long worked with nature and birds in his photography. By mixing his own images, images of other people’s images, and images from the internet, he creates new nature images of birds. Based on the exhibition, we raise questions concerning nature photography and what defines images of nature, but also what nature photography in 2020 means with all the digital possibilities that exist. During the evening, there will also be a release for the book The Bird project 2006 – 2017.