You could easily miss Spacious Copenhagen’s exhibition at the ground floor of 39 Vodroffsvej in Frederiksberg.
With something that looks like a computer on a table right by the large shop-front window and a nice green indoor tree in the background, the setting resembles one of the many creative workshops that are popping up in the streetscape; small consolations to offset the deplorable disappearance of shops in our city centres. Studios for ceramic artists and architects, for example. Which is in fact the case here, in a sense. The space is normally occupied by an architecture office that has temporarily retreated into the back, making room for jewellery artist Annette Dam’s nomadic exhibition platform. This is a project that Annette Dam has been working on for some time and which has previously visited the distinguished art gallery Specta in Peder Skrams Gade in Copenhagen.
This time, Annette Dam has brought together seven very different artists (who actually turn out to have quite a lot in common) under the title Alt hænger sammen med alt (Everything Is Connected to Everything), which is a quote by Gro Harlem Brundtland.
As expected, the computer-station-like installation in the shop-front window is in fact a sculpture. Many of the other objects inside this former retail space are works of art. Consistently understated. It is like entering a Wunderkammer, a chamber of curiosities, with a chamber music feel. Like an oversized jewel box full of artefacts and images, all carefully curated and arranged by a passionate collector.
This feeling of subdued intimacy is enhanced by the fact that many of the pieces are made entirely or partially of recycled materials. Everything is connected to everything – and something that looks like driftwood, perhaps as a symbol of travel and previous history, now takes on new form and function as organically shaped furniture. Designed by Josephine Andredottir and Emilie Bobek, the chairs – in the guise of planks washed ashore – are made of aluminium. Appearances are also deceptive in the sculpture – by Anders Aarvik – resembling a computer on a desk, since, with few exceptions, it is made of recycled wood and found objects. It too mimics a familiar everyday object.
Actual driftwood is included in Christine Bukkehave’s far too few contributions to the exhibition, all subtle updates of the traditional brooch form.
Wood is also a recurring feature in a series of wall objects by Anne Brandhøj, who has crafted pieces of maple, ash and other types of wood into silky smooth, perfectly rounded shapes whose perfection does not, however, prevent the inherent tension of the material to open up cracks in the smooth forms, thus, surrealistically, creating new images in the surfaces. In expression, Anne Brandhøj shows a kinship with Josefine Rønsholt Smidt, who creates jewellery that appears to occupy a position in between art objects and actual decorative items that could be worn as a necklace.
That is not an option with the exhibition’s largest and, in a sense, most striking piece: an 11-metre-long necklace-like object that flows from the wall onto the floor like a modern sculpture.
The necklace consists of a number of mostly round, often turned wooden objects, some of them perhaps parts of dresser legs, found among the scraps and waste of our consumer society or bought on markets and now joined into a story about craft, past, regional history (we might imagine an Eastern European or Baltic everyday aesthetic, and the artist, Anna Rikkinen, was born in Finland). The individual objects may have been part of countless homes, but here, they have been assembled into new meaning and a statement that everything is connected to everything. Hanging on the wall, the piece might even seem to suggest an opening of sorts. A portal, perhaps?
During my visit to the exhibition, I become aware that in addition to an affinity for wood and recycled materials, there are other – shall we say ‘mental’ – ways in which everything (or most of it) is connected to everything else (at least as far as some of the pieces are concerned).
Several of the artworks spark associations to portals – transitions into a different consciousness or an alien world. Maybe – to insist on a fairytale aspect – a little like the wardrobe entrance to Narnia in the British author C. S. Lewis’s series of children’s books.
Anders Aarvik’s computer screen could be such a portal? Usually, a journey into the golden screen would connect the user to others, to knowledge and to experiences (and, to be sure, to a great deal of visual and mental pollution). In this case, however, the screen is charred, and getting in touch with other worlds and new insights has to be up to the imagination of the beholder.
The portal motif is more clearly stated in a series of small, intense, beautiful and sensuous (photogravure) prints by Mette Borup Kristensen. The topics come from nature, as a section of a tree root, perhaps, or a mandola-shaped opening in a piece of bark grows into figures balancing between abstraction and associations to portals to something else, further supported by the titles of the individual images. The same is the case for the title Door to the past of a piece by Christine Bukkehave in amber, gold and driftwood.
Everything seems to be thoughtfully connected in the well-curated exhibition that Annette Dam has arranged in the premises of Studio Nathalie Schwer, on display until 14 December.
About the Exhibition
21 November – 14 December 2024
Adress:
Studio Nathalie Schwer, Vodroffsvej 39, 1900 Frederiksberg, Denmark.
Artists:
Anders Aarvik (DK), Josephine Andredottir (DK/ IS) & Emilie Bobek (DK), Anne Brandhøj (DK), Christine Bukkehave (DK), Mette Borup Kristensen (DK), Anna Rikkinen (FI) og Josefine Rønsholt Smith (DK)
Theme: Outlook
Artist-in-residence, exhibitions and competitions in international contexts have always been part of the DNA of craft artists and designers. What stories do they take with them? What knowledge do they bring back home?
