Stavanger, Norway
Think of the body as an interior world, imagine entering it, what would you see? What if that body were in pain, or suffering from disease, or otherwise in distress? Marit Victoria Wulff Andreassen’s large, intensively worked colored pencil pictures envision something like the inside of the mouth, the spaces through which blood flows, the folds of flesh, the squeeze of orifices, the passageways of the esophagus and the intestines. Sometimes her renderings recall geological places, like a cave with its stalactites and stalagmites, but mostly they feel like a landscape comprised of the parts of the body we struggle to see, even as they affect us deeply. Notably, Andreassen composes with near perfect symmetry, a quality only partly true of our bodies, less so as they become ill and age; but symmetry implies control and perfection, and it calms. The exception to this rule is her inclusion, in “Backwards Dreaming,” of a tangle of green flowering vines at center. Asymmetrical and with cut-paper edges, they act not unlike potted plants in a sickroom, providing the promise of health, or at least an example of it.
—Lori Waxman, March 17, 4:27 PM