The Exquisite Capabilities of the Flying Carpet
The Dreadful Sound when the Fish went Fishing
Into The Pyramid
The Ruins of the Future
Penetrating Pores of Construction
Mutated Small Town Limbo
The Boat
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The dreadful sound when the fish went fishing.
"Allegories," as Walter Benjamin wrote in 1919, "are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things".
And, to give his thought a backward reading, ruins have long been taken as allegories: for the unsettling experience of change, for the moment in which man-made creation can no longer resist natures destructive forces. Kjærgaards work evolves around the existential struggle between work of man and nature at stake within ruins and desolated landscapes – crumbling archtetural structures and empty urban shells; mines, ships, watchtowers, sheds, and factories. All of them left for something else to happen, to mourn or remember. A mutation, an inhabitation, a penetration, extending themselves in unlikely ways.
“The dreadful sound when the fish went fishing” - Kjærgaard's first solo show in Germany - invites you to the cold and lifeless regions of the Arctic Circle. The place evokes a feeling of: “They came, they saw, they conquered” - and was concured one might add – revealing a subtle fatale undertone. Left of the old fisherman's town is only shattered houses, a fish factory, old boats. Kjærgaard's work inhabits these constructions, build upon their remains and infuse sound on what was once new. Big scale paintings in acrylic, their drips and splatters seeming to liquefy the solid, are accompanied by architectural structures standing on the limb of transformation. As if emerging from a sunken depth.
At first glance, Kjærgaard’s fascination with ruins takes on the pathos of the nostalgic look into the past, but in truth her buildings and urban spaces are much more than that. They give us the dizzying upwards perspective of a child, a notion of space in flux.
Kjærgaard’s installations and paintings act as transistion doors for our imagination to enter – for a moment we can all take the trip through the hole that led Alice into a land of Wonder.
“The Dreadful Sound when the Fish went Fishing” continues Kjærgaard's investigation of fallen utopias and like most of her work, the exhibition should be seen as a series of unpredictable openings from the past into the future. When you are near the Arctic Circle everything is a machine. Nothing is present unless it is necessary. |
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