Stian Ådlandsvik
Negative growth
Galleri K has the pleasure of welcoming you to Stian Ådlandsvik's second solo exhibition in the gallery. In Negative growth, we are confronted with a time horizon extending from the Mesolithic and forward into our own use of tools. Ådlandsvik shows a number of new works where methodical sections and divisions, or energetic attacks, open haptic connections to the people who have been involved in the production. The decrease in value suggested by the exhibition title is linked to activities of undermining function, and points to an alternative value found in resistance to an economy of pure growth. The exhibition shows Ådlandsvik's poetic and precise interaction with things and their biographies. Traces of production and an exploratory attitude towards materials and processes become a whole where the threads of one work are picked up and taken further in the next.
With its slashed sides and stabbed recesses, the waterproofing container of the concrete sacks have been broken. Nevertheless, the flow ability is retained by the wrapping, a shell of paper and plastic that makes the cement a manageable trade unit. It is traceable in the shape, and in the folds and wrinkles of the surface. The knife is left in the petrified body. It is similar in shape to a flint dagger, catalogued in the archaeological collection of the Museum of Cultural History and dated to approx. 7000 before Christian time, found in Vestfold, probably by an imported flint kernel. But the dagger left in the concrete is made of solid aluminium, the metal of high velocity. The stone tool was 3D scanned in a narrow office on Økern, printed in nylon which thereafter became the basis for a shell for aluminium casting. The surface, covered in small spirals that characterizes the 3D printer's layering, conveys this storey, a storey about time travelling, from the stone carver who knapped the blade up to the artist violating building materials.
Mann som jager en flue med kniv [Man chasing a fly with a knife] is a drawing from the sketchbook of Adolph Tidemand, dated to 1835. The motif is adequately described in the title, but who tries to kill flies with knives? A peculiar choice of tool. Ådlandsvik’s screen print is a rasterized interpretation of the drawing taken from the National Museum's online collection, printed with a colour he has extracted from a polypore - a mushroom growing on tree trunks where the bark is damaged. It causes the timber to rot, weakening the toughness of the tree. Typically the trunk breaks 1 to 2 meters above the ground. The colour is made by steeping the grounded down polypore in water and ammonium chloride, finally a binder from acacia bark (gum arabic) is added to the decoction. Overall, the motif, the reproduction and the materials bring together a story of an annoying intruder that brings a supreme power to desperation, it is a story about tools, attacks and improvement in degradation.
In an ongoing series of paintings Ådlandsvik takes scanners, printers, DVD-players, screens and various other production-and-entertainment gadgets to pieces. a careful dissection, one machine per canvas The parts of the machine are laid onto the stretched canvases which are covered by thin layers of paint, disrupting the still wet paint crust. The process unfolds in segments and repetitions, creating a history of traces and wounds on and into the depth of the colour field developing on the stretched canvas. The last people to see these parts of the machines were the factory workers assembling them, here their labour is reversed, exposed and integrated into the painting. The paintings become a facade revealing another place and another situation, and thus connects the modernist flat painting with the language of liberal economy.
Negative growth selects an inversion of usefulness as growth, following the materiality and inside of the things we take for granted and are persistently asked to consume. The trace is followed back in time, to find out where the things came from. In the end one could imagine a mirrored process, sometime in the distant future, after thousands of years have passed, when the organic material has rotted and the plastic is worn down and scattered to the winds, nothing is left but a stone-age aluminum blade. Stian
Ådlandsvik (b. 1981 in Bergen, Norway, lives and works in Oslo and Leipzig) holds a degree from the National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo and from Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg. His works has been shown nationally and internationally at venues such as Noplace (Oslo), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Galleri Erik Steen (Oslo), Season gallery (Seattle), 1/9 Unosunove (Rome), Fotogalleriet (Oslo), UKS (Oslo), MOT International (London). Ådlandsvik has been included in collections of among others Astrup Fearnley MOMA (Oslo), and Nomas Foundation (Rome).
