Hell is Chrome
My new solo show at gallery Erik Steen opens thursday 25th of November at 7 p.m. If in Oslo, please join us for the reception.
Visit the gallery web site for more information
About the show:
A showcase contains a bent metal bolt and a similarly bent and cracked casing. The rough surface tells us that these items are not industrially made: they are three-dimensional printed copies of two aircraft components which were the direct cause of a plane crash, precisely because they were copies. The aircraft industry has a serious problem in that replacement parts and their certificates can be well camouflaged fakes that are almost impossible to discover. Substandard parts are used in good faith with catastrophic consequences, while those that produce them cheaply earn a good profit. The destruction of the aircraft gave these parts their unique form and turned them into individual originals. In order to copy them, Ådlandsvik has made digital, 3D models based on photographs. The copied objects establish a pattern of production in Ådlandsvik's exhibition, where destruction, simplification and concealment of the truth are used as constructive leitmotifs.
The process involved in assuring functionality by the requirement to certify and document all mechanical parts has been turned upside down in the sculpture "Convergence". This work consists of the remains of a photocopier– the result of a transformation, whereby the panels and components were taken apart piece by piece and then photocopied on the machine. The artist continued with this process until the machine could no longer make copies. In this way, the machine documented its own decay, while at the same time exposing its own components.
Many of the objects we are surrounded by in our daily lives reveal little of what they consist of or where they come from. In all industrial production, cost-efficiency is a weighty argument for the choice of parts and the title of the exhibition reveals that this lack of information indeed can turn catastrophic. In Ådlandsvik's new works, he examines the history and construction of ordinary objects by means of subtle manipulations, relocations and reorganisations and uses camouflage and deconstruction as tools to open up for numerous levels of interpretation.
The show will be on until 9th of January.
