Monday May 19, 7pm
Afternoon Lunatic
Videos by Aasa Ersmark
admission $6 – artist in person
Still from Lunatic (Aasa Ersmark, 2012) © courtesy of the artist
Microscope is very pleased to welcome Swedish artist Aasa Ersmark to New York to present a screening program of short video and animation works. Ersmark, whose practice includes both video and sculpture, engages with hand-made objects, animated photographs, as well as the human body. Objects and processes can be seen as moving sculptures in works that are “both static and moving, sculptural and animated, physical and ephemeral.” And, familiar imagery is often transformed into something other than what is expected or known.
Esmark’s 2012 Lunatic is a photographic animation of multiple moons, waxing and waning, pulsating together as a community – frenetic, but in unison, unsettling our understanding of our nearest celestial neighbor and cleverly working within etymological boundaries of the word “lunacy”. In works such as Volcano (2008) the human body – specifically a woman’s nipple leaking milk – appears as newly constructed landscape. Esmark’s most recent work, Dream Triptych (2014) derives from the artist’s actual early childhood nightmares. The works in the program range from 20 seconds to 5 minutes and were made between 2008 and 2014.
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Aasa Ersmark (1981) is an artist and filmmaker based in Stockholm, Sweden. Working across sculpture and video installation, her work has been exhibited at The Modern Museum in Stockholm, Tribeca Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Oberhausen Film Festival, Färgfabriken in Stockholm, and the Gothenburg Art Museum among many others. Ersmark received her MFA from The Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm and grants from The Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Studio Grant, City of Stockholm, and The Royal Institute of Art among others.
The evening is made possible with the support of The Swedish Arts Grants Committee.
PROGRAM
The Archer
2009, 00.20 min
Afternoon Dragon
2014, 01.30 min
A momentary lapse in reality offers a new symbolic possibility in the image.
Volcano
2008, 03.10 min
“…we see milk seeping from a woman´s breast, a poetic setting of the body and its uncertain topography which resembles here a smoking volcano.” – Mats Stjernstedt, Director of Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo
Sunset
2009, 02.10 min
Landscape as body body as landscape.
Metal Bells in the afternoon
2010, 03.54 min
A tactile study of classical sculptures in Stockholm opens up a view of a hidden process where symbols are unstable and undefined.
Mirror
2010, 04.25 min
An apparatus of looking is slowly physically transformed over time rendering it powerless.
Afternoon Lunatic
2011, 02.35 min
In deep Stockholm winter, the boundaries between day and night become confused leading to an offset of the body’s natural rhythms and opening up a space for the dream life to creep into reality.
Lunatic
2012, 05.30 min
A photographic animation reflecting the fragmentary experience of existing simultaneously within several points in time. Different phases of the moon flicker in front of our eyes, as the haunting pulsation of music by Simon Mullan and Theodore Trottner builds to a frenetic hysteria as the moon waxes and wanes.
Saturn
2011, 04.00 min
The planet Saturn is named after the god Saturn, who ruled over time, death and melancholy. The video is a sculptural and cinematic ritual where the symbology of saturn is deconstructed from myth to abstraction. The soundtrack is composed of radiotelescope recordings of the amplified sounds of Saturn.
Without title
2014, 00.20 min
Dream Triptych (work in progress)
2014, 01.25 min
The first of many nightmares/hallucinations Ersmark experienced as a child and teenager.
Still from Without Title (Aasa Ersmark, 2014) © courtesy of the artist
