YLVA OGLAND

Unconscious With the Chessmen Shadows

May 14 – July 17, 2009

Bernier - Eliades Gallery is proud to present a solo show by Ylva Ogland.

Ylva Ogland is using painting as a conceptual language and deals with a mixture of issues from her life, swinging between reality, subconscious and fiction. Her works range from still-life paintings of drug paraphernalia often coupled with familiar objects from her childhood, to self-portraits and images of her own genitalia. A central character of her work is her imaginary twin sister Snöfrid who lives in mirrors and every time she appears she transforms into something new.

In her previous works Ogland has often treated the autobiographical with mainly paintings and painting installations reflecting some of the more poignant moments of the artist’s life.

At Bernier – Eliades Gallery, she continues her use of painting as a conceptual language but the melt of the personal and intimate with some of her fictional inventions, eminent during her past works, have opened up for a new world of motifs.

If she earlier opened up a painted field blurring up the difference between reality and representation with the help of her imaginary twin sister Snöfrid (and her use of mirrors), she now continues to a shadow land. From a world dealing with reflections to a world of shadows. The shadow has earlier only been present as a metaphor, and by the use of the peephole, or the way in which she has arranged with her installations, in Unconscious With the Chessmen Shadows, she deals directly with the shadow.

If her use of the mirror reflection somehow has been about scrutinizing a state of awareness, of consciousness, her use of the shadow is an attempt to go beyond the conscious, and enter the world of the subconscious or the unconscious.

In Unconscious With the Chessmen Shadows she goes back to some of her earlier work, like the Xenia series of still life paintings of drug paraphernalia often coupled with familiar objects from her childhood, but in these shadow versions she adds different elements, glasses that belong to Snöfrid, and some hand crafted chessmen that her father made, adding yet another level to the autobiographical.

This exhibition is built up on three levels of consciousness and unconsciousness, or three levels of reality.

As the artist comments:

This show is a continuation of the theme, which my artistic practice is always striving to express. That is a feeling of uncontrolled reality […] it has its clear connections to art history, in this case Duchamp, Courbet, Warhol, and primitive west African art, Stravinsky's the Rite of Spring,and Ninjisky's original choreography of the ballet, when the girl is dancing till death.
As always my father is very present, he has done the chessmen.
When I was a kid I sometimes played chess with him, now it feels somehow, that he still lives inside these small figures.
The motive of the unconscious is from after a twelve hour-long, non-stop dancing night last summer in Berlin, when I almost lost my orientation to the outer world. Of course the shadow world is also connected to Plato's cave theory.

Ylva Ogland was born in 1974 in Umeå, Sweden. She lives and works in New York. She had a Master of Fine Arts in Royal University of College of Fine Arts in Stockholm. She has participated in several solo and group shows, she is a candidate for Carnegie Art Award 2010, and this year Bernier-Eliades will also present her work at REMAP Project, during the Athens Biennial (16/6 – 4/10).

The gallery is open Tuesday to Friday: 10:30 – 20:00. Saturday 12:00 – 16:00.