33 Suspensions (2023)

Reduce. Minimize. Find a common typology and seek an analogous form. Repeat. De-saturate. Enable. Meaning is derived from our capacity to invent. Imagine.
Find trace and allow it to infiltrate and inform. Without drawing parallels, we seek answers in what little has been given to us. Repeat. Reduce. Imagine.


Dan Skjæveland is a Norwegian artist whose new book 33 Suspensions asks the viewer to engage with clues and cryptic signals. Slippage occurs; memories of memory.
Rules are fragmented and declarations declined.
Decode. Decipher. Glyphs. Numbers.

Skjæveland’s images are demarcated by muted color, potential connections.

Transparencies, reflections, smudges and remnants. Residues of an urban palette. Gradations of grey, an interplay between warm and cool.
Tensions hang in the air, almost-abstraction modulating earth tone and metallic.

The viewer draws out their own meanings from the work. The images brood in an obtuse melancholy and echo American conceptual practice.
To delineate a strict path of meaning would disable the work and encroach on the profane.
Conceive. Deceive. Contradict.


33 Suspensions is not an exercise in willful avoidance. There is instead courage to assemble and proliferate ambiguous images, origins masked and muddied.
What reality do we occupy? Skjæveland’s images shimmer in their instability. As they take form and recede, the viewer is invited into a world without absolutes.

-Brad Feuerhelm, October 2023

___


You can get in touch at danskjaeveland(at)gmail.com if you prefer to pay with PayPal or other channels.

The book is also currently available at:

USA:
photo-eye (Santa Fe, NM)

EU:
Bildband Berlin

UK:
Setanta Books

NORWAY:
Tronsmo (Oslo)

Video of the book can be seen on Vimeo.


___
"Although Skjæveland has described himself as “not-political”, many of the images in 33 Suspensions express a feeling of decay
which will feel familiar to viewers who find themselves outside the West’s economic capitals.
Empty shopfronts, abandoned vehicles, damaged infrastructure. Managed decline.
There is something about the idea of suspension that feels particularly prescient in relation to the condition we find ourselves in.
That moment of observation as something hangs mid-air before it comes crashing down."

-Jackson Mount, C4 Journal

_

”33 Suspensions, like so many ghostly crucifixions, form a series of enigmatic images.
One can try to decipher each photograph, classify it in this or that genre (still life, abstraction, performance), but that is not the most important thing,
which is perhaps to understand that the entirety of the scenes of our lives, and the signs that dot them, form the blazon of a perfect existence.
In Dan Skjaeveland's gaze, there is a combination of astonishment and certain assurance, a fearless stupor, a mental tightrope walker.”

-Fabien Ribery, L’intervalle.blog

_

”A faint ominous undertone.
A stain here, a metallic glint there, something off centre, something else tightly wound.
Refraction and reflections that defy and deceive.
-
These images invite a heightened perception of surface, form and the subtle tensions inherent in the everyday.
We are urged to suspend any straightforward notions of what is and what should be.”

-Alex Prior, photobook_reviewer