Kelly | Marhaug | Ojalvo collaboration
Material
Photographic seizures distilled from live gestures specific to the site of encounter. Printed on Photo Rag 350gsm White 100% cotton paper.
Information
Borrowed Landscape is the collaborative lens-based project of artists Traci Kelly UK/DE, Rita Marhaug NO and Nisa Ojalvo USA. Over a period of five years the partners gathered to make improvised performance encounters related to specific political socio-economic, geographical, animal and mineral histories. Location and artist provocatively reinvent each other through gestures for camera and processes of ‘becoming landscape’ — ‘becoming otherly’. The images are a series of material and visceral interventions, leaving traces on terrains and bodies, marking both as unfixed and mutable.
Part One: Norway During a road trip along Norway’s E10 south to north coastal route the artists would stop the car and make immediate roadside interventions. This was followed by a further seven days making work across the length and breadth of Vestvågøy tucked just inside the Arctic Circle in Lofoten.
Part Two: UK During a two-week residency at Stiwdio Maelor, Wales, Borrowed Landscape investigated materiality and culture focussing on the local slate and copper mining industries, and the ravaged landscape that remains in a post-industrial era. The geological time frames that produce petrified forests and form mineral deposits contrast to photographic timeframes that reinvent the landscape and the sited body in fractions of seconds.
Part Three: USA The Mohave Desert component explores the politics of water in relation to distribution and relocation through technology and through human bodies. It also plays with ideas around the gilt of the harsh unmediated sun and the lure of gold exemplified in the gambling industry of Las Vegas.
Borrowed Landscape exhibits through different modes including photographic installation, sculpture and video.
Exhibited
2021 Solo show at Galleri2, Stamsund, NO
2018 Solo show at Kunstgarasjen, Bergen, NO
2016 Group show: Two Way Mirror at Objectifs– Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore, SG
Install photo credits
Kelly | Marhaug | Ojalvo and Kjell Ove Storvik