I decided to go back to painting. The professor was hesitant but I insisted and was allowed in to the painting department. That meant I got a studio in Gråbygget, and actually a room on my own. Because of that I moved out of the apartment and started to sleep in my studio.
I wanted to free myself from the craftmanship of applying paint to a surface. The first work I did was a series with adhesive vinyl on white laminate. A company in the same building as the school made kitchen furniture, so I could buy the plates at a good price.
Nina Roos visited the school and we made an exhibition in the project room. I made this piece with silhouettes from film stills.
At one point I started working with meranti veneer. It is from the rain forest but at the time their were little awerness of climate change. The patterns here is still adhesive vinyl and is made from magnifying copy prints. Like the one I did with the big fingerprint in the Record piece.
I wanted my works to be as minimal and simple as possible. This is just raw sheets of vinyl rolled out on wood and arbitrary cut from the roll.
The same thing, but larger format and with colored masonite plates.
Rita Roos was teaching art theory at the school, and she like some of my stuff from first year. Inspired by that I started working with objects and ready mades again.
I used two of the photos from the Record work and made these. The glass in the frames are blackened and it is two actual bookmarks in front of the photos.
This work titled Panoptikon features a carpet that a company rents out to stores. I had noticed that many shops in the city had the same carpet in the entrance and realized that a company came and picked them up daily and placed a new one exactly the same. This interchangeability interested me. To me it represented the ultimate commodity, pure object - emptied of all particularity. A space which is truly abstract, and which the individual subject has no access to.
I made a installation called Text. It was based on a old text from a book about hypnosis I found in a second hand bookshop. The work is about the power relations between writer and reader. How reading demands physical submission, movement of the body and the eyes, but also submission to the text. A critical reading must always come after understanding the text, and then the reader is already under the texts influence.
I started to paint the text to the wall but stopped in the middle of the process. The audience could read the entire text from the overhead on the floor.
A series that deals in three different ways with whats in front of the canvas, the surface, or the image field. Treating the surface as the scene onto which the art enacts. Meaning that the actual art happens between the viewer and the illusory background - the representing state that make the art experience possible.
This was a attempt to investigate the possibility to use liquid paint as a material again.
Two simple text based works that was very important to me.
A series about sex and desire. The images is drawings from a educational book about sex. Formally I was influenced by the red paintings of Ola Billgren.
The image in the painting is from a yoga instruction book.
My last work in the second year was a conceptual painting. The two pieces on top of each other is two parts of the same plate.
Aurora and I had broke up during my first year. But we still spent the summer after together in our apartment at Zinkensdamm in Stockholm. At the end of the first semester I had some turmoil in my life. Aurora wanted to swop our apartment to a smaller one for her self because the rent on ours was too much for her alone. I agreed to that. Then a teacher at the school suddenly died and I had to visit the funeral in Helsinki. On my way there I stopped in Stockholm and Aurora told me she had met a new boyfriend. It was difficult news for me, because it meant my ties to Stockholm was broken and I felt astray.
In spite of my troubled state, or maybe because of it, I started seeing Tine Aamodt back in Trondheim and we initiated a relationship.