Image Support

“Image Support” presents the work of four international artists across the four main galleries of Bergen Kunsthall. Taking as their starting point ideas around the image and its construction, all of the artists explore the complex relations between technology, representation, production and reproduction (both industrial and craft-based).

In the work of Eileen Quinlan and Lucas Blalock, photography is used not only to document a reality beyond the camera lens, but also as a technical process through which the image is created or situated by means of it’s chemical or digital apparatus.

In Quinlan’s work she manipulates negatives by scratching or subjecting them to corrosive chemicals or processes. In another series she employs a flatbed scanner, producing a kind of ‘anti-abstraction’ using mirrors and other objects and materials that she places or moves across the scanners surface.

Blalock’s work often begins with a staged, studio set up — a kind of ‘still life’ — that he photographs using a medium format camera and then manipulates, using Photoshop and digital post-production techniques, to create provocative and complex analogue / digital hybrids.

Marieta Chirulescu and Ann Cathrin November Høibo’s works are located in painting, sculpture and textile, but they too engage in similar processes of manipulation, production and reproduction.

Chirulescu also employs scanners, copiers and post-production tools in order to produce her canvases, which involve a complex layering of real and virtual materials and spaces, whilst continuing to allude to a tradition of painting.

Høibo’s work is perhaps the most sculp- tural, exploring the inherent materiality of various found and altered textiles, fabrics, and objects. In her hand-woven tapestries, one can see an improvised, personal, but almost mechanical production, again referring directly to the technology of the loom, but through this more explicitly ‘craft’ based technique.

Through their very different studio-based practices, the four artists all work in the borderland between creating images and locating images. The final work arises by way of a self-reflexive investigation of the material itself, a process that lays the basis for improvisation and exploration, and which often permits chance and “errors” in production to become crucial to the image-making process. In this way they reveal that the material of an artwork is not just a physical foundation or support for an image; in many cases it constitutes both the image itself and the content of the work.

Lucas Blalock (b. 1978), lives and works in New York.
Marieta Chirulescu (b. 1974), lives and works in Berlin and Rome.
Ann Cathrin November Høibo (b. 1979), lives and works in Kristiansand.
Eileen Quinlan (b. 1972), lives and works in New York.