EMMA WIESLANDER / CURATED BY GRANT WILLING

STATEMENTS Sunset / Looking at the Sun, 2006 / The Museum Of Snow, 2007 / Black Mirror, 2006 ‘Sunset’ is animated from more than 500 photographs of a sunset. The photographs are cropped and narrated so that the sun stays in the middle. Thus, the animation follows the movement of the sun instead of as we usually view the sunset as if we had a fixed viewpoint and the sun was setting. This way, we dissolve the static perspective viewpoint making visible the movement of the earth instead of the sun. // In Turner’s painting Light and Colour – The Morning After the Deluge from 1843 he makes visible a direct look at the sun. From being reliant on representational devices such as the camera obscura he here confronts it directly, making central the retinal processes of vision in the painting represented as a fusion of sun and eye, an impossible painting of a luminescence that is blinding simultaneously as it is the afterimage of the overwhelming light. The shape corresponds both to the form of the sun and the pupil. This way the body takes on the function of the sun, and through being the source itself, makes the sun belong to the body. When making the photographs I was interested in the tension and relationship between the far away and the self. I found it interesting how something so far away is practically impossible to look at, and at an unreachable distance can have a bodily effect on us. // The series The Museum of Snow photographically literally freezes the existing chunks of snow. Displayed in an imaginary museum the temporality of the snow is, through photography, arrested. I am interested in how the new solidity of the snow coupled with the manner in which it is displayed suggests an importance. The cold icy crystals are exhibited as rare and sought after treasures. Protected from the warmth found on the outside of the museum walls, the snow is prevented from melting. // Before the photographic technique to fix an image was resolved, the Claude Glass – a sort of black mirror – was one of the viewing devices utilized to transport the surrounding world into a flat image. William Gilpin, an artist and user of the Claude Glass, articulated in frustration a photographic desire to arrest the ever-changing images reflected in his Claude Glass. He wrote: “We should give any price to fix, and to appropriate the scene.” On the nature of these reflections, already transported into a visual regime, he wrote: “…they are like the visions of the imagination; or the brilliant landscapes of a dream. Forms, and colours, of the brightest array fleet before us.” The Black Mirror photographs are made in The Lake District, then and now admired for its picturesque beauty. They are titled after the geographical locations where the photographs are made, mounted behind glass and displayed on a shelf made of walnut. // My work is concerned with the intertwined cyclical aspects of the everyday. Through photographing ever-changing subjects and permanently freezing them, I am portraying situations that would otherwise fade away or are in a constant state of transience. The cyclical conditions I am depicting are further echoed in the circular appearance of my images.

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