Friday, October 15, 2010

THE PUBLIC SURFACE

PUBLIC SURFACE presents:

THE PUBLIC SURFACE
SUSANNE PERSSON


Opens October 17, 1 - 4 p.m.
and will be on view until November 14

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Susanne Persson has created a visual enterprise where logos, matters, product design and historically and culturally important symbols are intertwined in a way that raises questions both of heritage and cultural relations and semiotics and the human process of creating meaning.

In two untitled mixed media works that are part of a series, elementary symbols, that historically have been used with both religious, political, artistic and commercial aims, are taken from packages for food and cleaning supplies. First isolated and magnified they are then painted on to prints of images from Persson's archives collected for their semiotic or symbolic value. The process at the same time points out and elucidate the symbol's values, as it renders them indecipherable. The collages become impossible riddles, heavy with signs they solicit a decoding, pointing to our linguistic and emotional need for creating meaning.

With Red Triangle, a triangular shape is blown up and covers one of the walls. The perfect shape, formerly a pristine logo, is made flaccid. The sculpture, carved out in foam rubber, bends from the shape of the room. Leaning against the wall, the triangular shape and its red color becomes a reminiscent of an ancient wall painting or poses as a remainder from a religious rite.

The as yet untitled installation on the floor consisting of 50 alabaster sculptures of dildos becomes a modern play with the phallus symbol. At once playing with the Greek idealizing statues of the male body, celebrating the beauty of man, but here leaving only the portrayed penis, using a replica of what's already a replica the sculpture also turns to ideas of reproduction and sexuality and yet becomes something else entirely where the portrayed body parts become separate from the body all together and is emphasized as symbol.

In White Series Persson is using the shapes of obsolete electrical and mechanical domestic appliances, where all other markers of identity is removed. The machines are combined in to new formations and covered in white paint they suggest both the ruin and the freshly formed new product alluding to cultural and consumption patterns.

Book an appointment to see the exhibition at 0705- 45 92 41 or publicsurface@gmail.com, or visit us Sundays between 1- 4 pm.

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