The title of the exhibition is taken from a short story by science fiction writer Ray Nelson, and points to an excession of physical laws through travel in spacetime. The work of the artists is based on concepts such as wormholes, gravity, spacetime and suburbia.
Tiril Schrøder combines digital prints, drawings, paintings and painted surfaces on walls with large murals. The motifs bear certain, but indeterminate, similarities to familiar genres such comics, films, fotonovela, science fiction, virtual worlds and landscapes.
There is a fundamental duality to Schrøder’s depictions of nature. Ever present is the hint of something chaotic which could end up totally out of control. Volcanoes threaten to erupt, cars crash or other disaster scenarios that would disturb the suburban idyll. Nature rubs up against cultural structures such as architecture, technology and notions of civilisation and morality.
References to the natural sciences are clearly present in Anne Thomassen’s works. In porcelain and earthenware, she has created objects that show matter moving from one state to another, from liquid to solid and vice versa. In contrast to the scientific striving for uniqueness, Thomassen’s works are ambiguous. The works are about change and about the forces that cause change, but the direction the change of state or movement takes is left to the imagination of the beholder. The objects are like frozen snapshots torn out of a narrative sequence of events.
The artists share a common interest in romantic landscape painting, science fiction, comics and science, but deal with this interest in different ways. At RAM galleri, the works are sometimes merged together into one joint work, and other times they are parallel works with different approaches addressing the same theme. The partnership consists, among other things, of an entire wall made up of different pictures and a mural by Tiril Schrøder, “Practical application of the principles of relative time dilation” (2014), combined with the installation of Thomassen’s ceramic objects that form a transition from the surface into space. From one dimension to another. A wormhole.
In simple terms, a wormhole is a hypothetical topological feature of spacetime, which, if it existed, would be a tunnel-like “shortcut”, connecting space and time at two different places and times in the universe. The entrance to RAM galleri from Kongens gate functions as a wormhole when it becomes the portal, the fastest way we must pass through to get into the exhibition or – if you will – into another dimension and time, i.e. the universe the artists have created in the gallery.
Through the use of metaphors, the art invites new interpretations of reality, paving the way for a new way of thinking. And this is, of course, the strength of the art.
Time travel for pedestrians
