Counter Luminary

Photography is a flexible medium. It shares certain traits with other mediums such as cinema, drawing, and painting to various degrees. It can even be performative. Photography is also a very specific mode of communication. It is not a language. It shares, at best, a facility toward grammar, but due to its subjectivity and its tenuous association to perceived realities and histories, it can never become truly fixed within the context of language. It therefore remains elusive, esoteric, and its asset is that it remains flexible in bridging externalities to an internalized force of subjective reason.

At its base, photography is a technical medium, its assurances are developed through what is understood in the development of its making. In assessing what is to be perceived from the photographic image, an audience is held hostage to its meaning only through the knowledge of its technical processing, the rest of its arrangement to meaning is surface, and it is counter-luminary as illumination itself shares the suggestion of discovery and confirmation. Photography cannot illuminate or confirm, it can only relate to an audience a relational subjectivity, unmoored by the unification of clarity of absolute terms.

In the work of Dan Skjæveland, the fundament of experiencing the artist’s work involves a degree of questioning the territory of meaning associated with objects and surfaces that we believe we perceive as relating to the physical world, and yet, within the work, key illusory elements function within our perception of the photographs that exist in a state of what may be termed slippage. Slippage functions as a state in which the cursory reading of the photograph presents as something bordering on the recognizable, and yet, when examined in detail, small hints and photographic artifacts begin to present themselves that question how we understand each image. Often, this can be related to the artist’s focus on common objects, materials, and color palettes that present as obvious upon first reading. When we pull the surface of his work apart, more questions arise about the technical genesis of the images and what was once an easy read disbands. The photographs are luminous, but they are not illuminating. In each photograph, a direct connection to reality slips, and becomes grist for disbelief, or doubt. What presents as simple, is instead complex–a series of mirrors and reflections that become contradictory to what we understand as a relationship to the real.

This suggests a complex arrangement in which the photograph functions as an outright illusion of simple or common objects and materials that present as deceptively obvious resolutions to the technical medium and its reading. They become intentionally elusive, and they refuse exact relationships to the world, and, in essence, become projections of the viewer’s relationship to the world on individual terms. One must consider both the photograph and oneself to determine their significance or position in the world, and in doing so, ask the same from the viewer themselves

In this exhibition, Skjæveland’s work asks the viewer to inform their own illuminations within the work. In doing so, he allows the freedom of expression and interpretation that lacks when searching for corroborative meaning. The artist suggests, rather, a series of propositions, both photographic and in book form, and disallows formal explanation giving license to the viewer to emit, transfer, and imbue the images with their own meaning. When is a brick a brick? What is its weight in the world? What is its proximity to the viewer in both physical and relational terms? What do someone else’s photographs activate within the possibilities of the viewer’s experience? These are questions that disallow answer and yet their very function is a function of freedom to allow all possible meanings to be derived from the work and the viewer’s relationship to the physical world.

-Brad Feuerhelm, exhibition text for a show at Fotland mølle, Aug. 11 - Sept. 01, 2024