Dan Skjæveland is a Norwegian artist
Episode 377: Dan Skjæveland is a Norwegian artist whose new book 33 Suspensions has been published by Nearest Truth Editions.
Having worked on 33 Suspensions with Dan for the past year, I want to declare in full transparency that I am biased as I am very proud of Dan’s book. It is an oddly unnerving and atmospheric book that hints at possibilities but does not give anything away or lead the viewer to a declared state of meaning. Dan is someone whose professionalism is something I have come to learn from, and it has been an absolute joy to work with him on his first book. Below is the press release from his book. PLEASE TUNE IN!
Reduce. Minimize. Find a common typology and seek an analogous form. Repeat. De-saturate. Enable. Meaning is derived from our capacity to invent. Imagine. Find trace and allow it to infiltrate and inform. Without drawing parallels, we seek answers in what little has been given to us. Repeat. Reduce. Imagine.
Dan Skjæveland is a Norwegian artist whose new book 33 Suspensions asks viewers to engage with clues and cryptic signals. Slippage occurs; memories of memory. Rules are fragmented, and declarations are declined.
Decode. Decipher. Glyphs. Numbers.
Skjæveland’s images are demarcated by muted color, potential connections.
Transparencies, reflections, smudges, and remnants. Residues of an urban palette. Gradations of grey, an interplay between warm and cool. Tensions hang in the air, almost abstraction modulating earth tone and metallic.
The viewer draws out their own meanings from the work. The images brood in an obtuse melancholy and echo American conceptual practice. To delineate a strict path of meaning would disable the work and encroach on the profane.
Conceive. Deceive. Contradict.
33 Suspensions is not an exercise in willful avoidance. There is instead courage to assemble and proliferate ambiguous images, origins masked and muddied. What reality do we occupy? Skjæveland’s images shimmer in their instability. As they take form and recede, the viewer is invited into a world without absolutes.
