Bright Lights, Big City Painting

The speed of the city without and the speed of the traveling within oneself, can bring on many sights and lights and glares and flares of identity and adventure. It can bring dangerous and brilliant accidents of insight or terrible traumatic accidents of injury to the soul and to the body. The big city of Los Angeles for example inspires hope, growth and dreaming; ambition and greed, meanness sometimes, cruelty often and even suicide as a tragic outcome.... The stunning starlights can burn you with anticipation of things to come and desperation when they don't; the lights of fire and flames that occur in a city of many faces and some very angry can also burn you down physically and mentally. Betrayal is often the name of the game those around you want to play, and it's important to wisen up fast and furiously. The big city is already built and doesn't really need you, yet if you're the chosen one you can change the whole scene to what you'd like it to be! Just imagine...the late Mike Kelley, the LA artist from Detroit, Michigan! This is my ode to him, he who inspired me so tremendously as an artist so much that I attended grad school where he was teaching; and my past in the bright lighted city of Los Angeles where I grew up. Actually I grew up in Malibu and could see the gorgeous polluted sky of Los Angeles reflecting a rainbow of bright lights every night from our balcony. My adult days were spent within the large city with grad school, dance and acting classes, dance clubs, the art scene, museums, friends and boyfriends... When returning to Sweden after a film collaboration in France 2001 it was time to resume working alone, and at that point many personas needed shedding. This was the seed for ”Body/Video Project,” the peeling away and the becoming of identity, resulting in many suites of paintings ad infinitum, photographs and ”Queen Bee,” the DVD. The body is always changing, from how it’s seen to how it sees and feels in its environment. How do these changes in seeing and being seen affect our psyches? How is a body viewed differently when in a painting than in a video? These are some questions I ask in "'Queen Bee' Body/Video Project" which includes "Queen Bee" performance video installation (DVD projection, 35 minutes 2004), "Film still/paintings," "TV still/paintings" 2003-, "Closets Series" color photographs 2004 and ”Closet paintings,” Stockholm 2005. The aim of this project is the search for a feeling. The sensorial equivalence between the movement of color and the static space of a painting with the space that occurs in a video image. I have explored this with six video-performance works. I shave my whole body and paint it black, white, red, yellow or rainbow and interact with my surrounding environment of collected and arranged objects and fabrics (mostly the same color as my body). Fabrics and things cover the whole inside of my bedroom closet. Facial expressions and movements become a reaction to this environment. The DV-camera has a difficult time focusing while movement occurs in this camouflaging-situation, sometimes resulting in a blurred monochrome image. The borders of my theatricalized body mesh with the closet space around it. Mimicry and dissolution of identity are the themes during the rediscovery of personality. While the video image tends toward a still monochrome, the large paintings present a more dynamic movement. Stemming from the video images in respective fields of color they carve out a space and feeling of speed. The bodies stretch and extend from still images and into the large area of painted canvas. This is a work that never finds its closing page...I am still writing and painting it...

Painting:Acrylic on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:59.1 W x 137.8 H x 1 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.