Torbjørn Rødland is a contemporary Norwegian artist whose photographs elicit sinister or unfamiliar narratives. Rødland often stages commonplace themes such as fashion ads, nudes, still lifes, and portraits but gives them an underlying quality of disruption or perversion. “The struggle is to make the image active and relatable; clear but complex,” he has explained. “Like our new reality, it has to be layered and open to paranoid interpretation.” Born on April 3, 1970 in Stavanger, Norway, he studied at both the Rogakand University Centre in his hometown and later the National College of Art and Design in the city of Bergen. Since graduating, Rødland has explored his native country, the American heartland, and Japan in producing his thought provoking images. The artist’s work is in dialogue with a number of other contemporary photographers, including Roe Ethridge, Elad Lassry, and Eileen Quinlan. He currently lives and works between Los Angeles, CA and Oslo, Norway. Today, Rødland’s works are held in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the National Museum of Art in Oslo, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among others.