VANNA BOWLES SURRENDER
1 MACH - 30 MARCH OPENING RECEPTION 1 MARCH 12 - 4 PM
The borders between nature and culture, presence and unawareness, are starting points for my work, and in this exhibition I try to create ambivalent images shifting between these contradictions. The exhibition consists of sculpture and a series of drawings. The subject matters in the drawings have been gathered from medicine and botany. They depict human beings in vulnerable positions, often in care or violated by others. The images’ main characters are often in some sort of unconscious state of being; asleep, meditating, unconscious or dead, perhaps in an un-communicative state of nature, in which the human becomes a form of existing vegetation, however without any capacity to act. In several of the images other’s hands, framed unclearly between authority and compassion, handle these individuals. The surrounding scenarios suggest a therapeutic situation of treatment, within which a mental or physical crisis is going on. Baroque anatomical theatres and the ways bodies were depicted during this period have influenced my images. In order to create an intimate and claustrophobic framework the drawings are close-ups, displaying parts of bodies, whilst the faces of carer’s/ perpetrator’s are turned away and left outside of the cut-outs. Focus lay on the vulnerable human and what is taking place in her body. Branches, leaves, leafage, and flowers grow out from the bodies and out of the surfaces of the images. I imagine this nature growing in and out of these people is like the inner life that we can’t always monitor. An inherit force that can be both life giving and destroying.
Vanna Bowles, February 2014
Vanna Bowles, born 1974 in Gothenburg lives and works in Oslo. She works with drawing, sculpture, photography and installation. Bowles operates a figurative and surreal idiom, often using optical effects and reliefs that destabilises the dived between the surface of the image and the spectator’s surrounding space. Bowles obtained training at the Kunsthøgskolen in Oslo and her work has previously been exhibited, in among other institutions; Skövde kulturhus, Malmö Konstmuseum and Stenersenmuseet i Oslo. Her work makes part of several collections such as Malmö Konstmuseum, Göteborgs Stad, The Swedish Art Council, Statoil Kunstsamling and Lillehammer Kunstmuseum.
1 MACH - 30 MARCH OPENING RECEPTION 1 MARCH 12 - 4 PM
The borders between nature and culture, presence and unawareness, are starting points for my work, and in this exhibition I try to create ambivalent images shifting between these contradictions. The exhibition consists of sculpture and a series of drawings. The subject matters in the drawings have been gathered from medicine and botany. They depict human beings in vulnerable positions, often in care or violated by others. The images’ main characters are often in some sort of unconscious state of being; asleep, meditating, unconscious or dead, perhaps in an un-communicative state of nature, in which the human becomes a form of existing vegetation, however without any capacity to act. In several of the images other’s hands, framed unclearly between authority and compassion, handle these individuals. The surrounding scenarios suggest a therapeutic situation of treatment, within which a mental or physical crisis is going on. Baroque anatomical theatres and the ways bodies were depicted during this period have influenced my images. In order to create an intimate and claustrophobic framework the drawings are close-ups, displaying parts of bodies, whilst the faces of carer’s/ perpetrator’s are turned away and left outside of the cut-outs. Focus lay on the vulnerable human and what is taking place in her body. Branches, leaves, leafage, and flowers grow out from the bodies and out of the surfaces of the images. I imagine this nature growing in and out of these people is like the inner life that we can’t always monitor. An inherit force that can be both life giving and destroying.
Vanna Bowles, February 2014
Vanna Bowles, born 1974 in Gothenburg lives and works in Oslo. She works with drawing, sculpture, photography and installation. Bowles operates a figurative and surreal idiom, often using optical effects and reliefs that destabilises the dived between the surface of the image and the spectator’s surrounding space. Bowles obtained training at the Kunsthøgskolen in Oslo and her work has previously been exhibited, in among other institutions; Skövde kulturhus, Malmö Konstmuseum and Stenersenmuseet i Oslo. Her work makes part of several collections such as Malmö Konstmuseum, Göteborgs Stad, The Swedish Art Council, Statoil Kunstsamling and Lillehammer Kunstmuseum.