CROOKED TRINKETS

Crooked Trinkets, Stramrud’s exhibition at Fotogalleriet, shows work from the touring solo exhibition of the same title at Levanger Kunstforening, Svolvær Kunstforening, Voss Kunstlag, Kunsthall Stavanger, and Kristiansand Kunsthall 2013-2014. It predominantly concentrates on Stramrud’s photographic series Livingroom Poetics and Shadow is the Queen of Color.

Marthe Elise Stramrud’s work is both comment and play on fine art’s age-old ambiguous relationship between reality and representation, on art’s desire to elevate a three-dimensional everyday object to its sublime two-dimensional representation. It is thus not accidental that Stramrud deliberately references 17th century still life painting, with her pursued interest in the lifeless object and its capacity to obtain a higher value by being reproduced in a poetic manner.

Stramrud is not a painter, however. Nor are her photographs painterly-like reproductions of traditional still life sujets. Like in Livingroom Poetics, there is something unfamiliar in the photographs of her sculptural compositions, based on unexpected combinations of ordinary objects such as a milk jar with a rope, a spool with a plastic tube or a rock with a kitchen sponge. By stripping objects off its original function and combining them to form a new sculptural entity, Stramrud unavoidably points at Surrealist juxtaposition techniques with its aim to create an image of emotional power and poetic reality.

It is, however, through aspects like colour or neutral background that the surrealist uncanniness fades out and is replaced by a reduced nakedness. The photographs thus tell a more rational, yet poetic and humorous, story about how the world is constructed and how we construct the world around us. Also Stramrud’s subsequent work including Shadow is the Queen of Color investigates these aspects, playing with attributes traditionally connected to specific artistic media and objects, thus allowing for multiple points of view.

Marthe Elise Stramrud (born 1984 in Kristiansand, lives in Bergen) graduated with a Bachelor in Fine Arts from The Bergen National Academy of the Arts in 2011 and attended The School of Photography / University of Gothenburg, Sweden from 2009 to 2010. Recent participations in group exhibitions include Time Place Light Smell at Platform, Stockholm (2014),Turn Turtle at Podium, Oslo (2013), Motlys at OSLContemporary, Oslo (2013) and The Autumn Exhibition (Høstutstillingen) at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2012).