Images below from MFA thesis show, shhh, March 17-21, CalArts
Resume / Bio
Biographical Information
Born 1981 in Minnesota
Lives and works in Valencia, CA
Education
2008 MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA
2004 B.S., Art, Summa Cum Laude, Northwestern College, Saint Paul, MN
Exhibitions
2008 We Want a New Object, Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA (upcoming) shhh, Gallery A402, Valencia, CA* Proposition 29025, 29025 Eveningside, Val Verde, CA
2007 It Could All Be So Simple But I'd Rather Make It Hard, Gallery D300, Valencia, CA Astri Swendsrud: MFA 1 Exhibition, L-Shape Gallery, Valencia, CA* Eveningside 5, 29025 Eveningside, Val Verde, CA
2004 The End of the End of the Line, The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, MN Senior Group Exhibition, Denler Gallery, Saint Paul, MN Senior Thesis Exhibition, Denler Gallery, Saint Paul, MN Student Competitive Show, Denler Gallery, Saint Paul, MN
i'm not going to hear it. i'm not going to tell you. go to sleep.
I've been thinking about that time at night, when you're not really awake but you're not quite asleep yet either. It's the time of night when the furniture might start moving, or it might be someone you knew. It's the time where the boundaries that normally establish the space of your mind as distinct from the surrounding environment lose their solidity. Their edges have suddenly sprouted tassels, like the borders of blankets, and have gotten tangled. I can't pull them apart anymore.
My work centers around an exploration of the limits of human perception and understanding, the tension that exists between the experience of everyday life and the desire - even need - to formulate explanations or conditions by which to understand, control and communicate experience.
You know that feeling of having a word stuck at the tip of your tongue? When you know that you know what you want to say, but you just can't do it. It hovers there, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, an untapped potential, sometimes surfacing just at the moment of having lost all relevance. I think that objects might do the same thing.
As boundaries and limits are increasingly determined and defined, however, a certain disconnect with reality occurs. What is gained in order can become a dead-end, a system separating itself from its origin and suppressing what it contains. Too often attempts at structure leave no room for finiteness, contingency - inescapable characteristics of being human. Creation of complete coherence is impossible. One can never account for all potential factors. There is no way to contain all the possibilities.
Musings on the need for objects and for stories: on their implicit potential, on the infinities that fold upon one another in any object, in any word, in any mind, in any act of communication or interaction between subjectivities. The particulars of activity, memory, materiality unfurl in this liminal space within which analysis becomes porous.
1. The value of things stored in boxes 2. Transience of memory, or the traces of a life lived over the course of time and space 3. Honest questions asked when alone, in the dark 4. Relation between the substance, specificity of an individual life and the unknown 5. Imagination and creativity as an active space of potential, possibility 6. The act of communication bridging gaps between subjects and objects
I want to give ample room for the human element and the honest question, to find the possibilities that are available in even the most fallible and fragile of beginnings. I want to explore the places where things do not add up, where the whole separates from merely my understanding of its parts. As I allow my constructions to be informed and affected by elements beyond the reach of my own control, it opens up the potential for much more than may seem initially apparent.
