Hilde Aagaard’s fourth solo exhibition opens at the Ground Floor of Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Centre on Wednesday 1st April 2009, at 19.30. The exhibition will run until 2nd May 2009.
Blind Mountain is an installation consisting of a series of large inkjet photographs, with over-painting and montage, and a free-standing construction. It continues Aagaard’s exploration of the internal and external experiences of observation that she began in her “Public Situations,” participatory performative events where the public was invited to sit in a designated place and regard a particular sight.
These productions establish a personal meditative experience (insight) of nature within the context of collective public activity (sight) of the same, while demonstrating the subjectivity and relativity of both.
Same image, different views
Not only do no two “sightseers” view the same scene in the same way, but the visibility of the landscape itself is constantly changing. This especially true in the Jotunheimen Mountains of Aagaard’s native Norway – the photographed scene in Blind Mountain – where vision is blurred by falling and settling snow, which continually alters the atmosphere and colours of the landscape.
Artwork by Hilde Aagaard. Photo: Jørn Hagen. Copyright Hilde Aagaard / BONO 2009.
For Blind Mountain, Aagaard transports the majestic Norwegian landscape into the confines of a windowless Athenian gallery space. The endless vistas have been removed to framed glass covered photographs. Each sight presents a different degree of visibility, ranging from clear with some snow on the ground to almost complete obliteration by (simulated) snowfall. Aagaard regulates these conditions by applying dots of white paint in variegated densities, and forcing our eyes to adjust to the clarity or opacity.
Snowblind
The free-standing construction, titled Snowblind, is a pair of binoculars set at eye-level on a pedestal, all of which is covered in plaster, except for the eyepieces. Yet whiteness is all that one views through them: a reference to the loss of sight in nature, an actual, painful condition known as snow-blindness, and by extension to the loss of views of nature.
The view-finding lenses are echoed in the photographs, either as superimposed circular images, as thin circular strips or over-painted with white dots, pointing up the limitations of what we are capable of seeing both externally and internally.
The exhibition is supported by the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Athens and the Norwegian Institute at Athens.
Andrea Gilbert