girlfire Print

Born in Stockholm, Sweden, the first photograph taken of me was by the Swedish tabloids. It was of me as a new-born baby with my parents in a hospital. At age three we moved to Los Angeles, California, where we lived for twenty-five years. My interest in the medium of video and issues surrounding identity and mimicry, I think, was ignited by the experience of having a mother that had been a TV star in Sweden (note: Margareta S portrayed the "Partaj Broad" on the Swedish variety show "Partaj" from the '60's - a take-off from the American show "Laugh-In" starring Goldie Hawn) as well as growing up with the film industry and its children next door. My painting is partly influenced by the consistent shifting of surrounding landscape throughout the years. Winters were spent in sunny Malibu, California with its magnificent mountains and vast and glittering Pacific Ocean - both seeming to go on into eternity. Disturbing rumors about rampant serial killers feuled many scary nights with hallucinatory visions and nightmares. Charles Manson had even set up shack on the property we moved onto! And just a drive along the breezy Pacific Coast Highway was LA where the sun got harder as it hit concrete and the mesh of freeways. Summers on the other hand were like entering a fairy tale world. They were spent with friends and relatives in Tyresö (all in the same little neighborhood) with its mysterious forests of mushrooms, berries and dirty old men that had mythical proportions in my fantasy; in beautiful Stockholm with its cramped buildings and imaginary chimney sweepers (or do they really exist?); on the west coast where my father somehow always convinced my sisters and I to sail away from the safe little islands and straight into stormy waters or the little town in "Norrland," higher north in Sweden where my mother was from. Every time I returned to one country from another, it felt and looked like I'd landed on another planet - strangely foreign in its familiarity. When I began my Master of Fine Art studies in Film/Video and Painting at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California I could not resist the pull to do work involving my mother and what had always confounded me-the split between her public image as a T.V. star and her private self as my mother. This exploration is ongoing as well as my attempt to break free from its confines.