Tomas Ramberg
Nominated by: Sol Lewitt
Born: 1973
Norway
Lives/works: USA
Statement
The Architecture of Interpretation
My recent work speculates on the disorienting and estranging flip side of symmetry.
The point of departure for this work is the interpretive charge of perspective, the semblance of the perspectival vanishing point to the focal point of visual hypnotic suggestion and photography’s embodyment of these associations. Linking the vanishing point to hypnosis – the pull into the vortex of the vanishing point may echo hypnotic suggestion – makes the myth of psychological depth the subject-matter of perspective as such. Thus my work traces a line between notions of subjectivity, structures of meaning, vision, concepts of space and pictorial technology.
Specifically, I work from the idea that the overlap of pictorial structures such as symmetry and perspective by structures of sight such as concentricity and focality, constitutes an extruded conceptual palimpsest™, and that this suspended palimpsest contains the architecture of visual interpretation.
By flipping and reversing images and objects and splicing them together across the vertical and horizontal central axis of the picture plane (or through the same focal point), I create new spaces, new points of view in a simultaneously ornamentally ordered and referentially disorienting and estranging new perspective, much like the way kaleidoscopes work. These guiding ideas inform and shape projects that take various forms in painting, photography, murals, drawing, scale models and the occasional video and carpet. If reference is a kind of gap, interpretation is the oscillating detour that defines that space between the perceived image and the image ultimately referenced. In this space symmetry is the architecture of interpretation.
- Postulates: the ultimate reference for any image is an image, architecture is pictorial, vision is interpretive, interpretation is mythical, hypnosis is the expression of the myth of psychological depth, psychological depth is the premise for the drama of interpretation.
™ A Palimpsest is the faint relief-like trace left on ancient sheets of parchment as they were often erased and reused. Today, the term is also used to describe different forms of conceptual or pictorial sedimentation or overlap where the layers merge.
Recent Exhibitions (Download full CV here)
2006 Jamais Vu, Galleri A, Oslo, Norway (solo)
2006 Push Me/Pull You, Collaboration with Artist Steve Robinson, ISE Foundation, New York
2005 Convergation, the Trygve Lie Gallery, New York City (solo)
www.tomasramberg.com
www.hypnosiswallpaper.info
