Torbjørn Rødland, Socks, Shoes and Tail, 2020. Courtesy of the Artist and STANDARD (OSLO).
Torbjørn Rødland, Pink Roof and Window, 2019–22. Courtesy of the Artist and David Kordansky Gallery.
Torbjørn Rødland, Eggs, 2019. Courtesy of the Artist, Nils Stærk and David Kordansky Gallery.
Public Bricolage
Torbjørn Rødland’s photographic practice includes a wide range of subjects, such as portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, united by their uncanny ability to both reinforce and destabilize the things and images that surround us daily. Connecting the language of pre-modernist painting, twentieth-century art photography, and popular contemporary illustration, Rødland’s photographs often recall dream-like tableaux due to their hyperreal and surreal nature. His work takes as its subject materials and objects that are often quite familiar, but through their juxtaposition, the artist’s intervention, and the highly sensory qualities of what he depicts, Rødland’s images prevent us from glossing over these things. Instead, they suspend the gaze through their ambiguity and the uncertainty they embrace. Rødland’s images entice the audience to look both longer and deeper, often provoking an emotional response and thereby exposing both personal and culturally conditioned ways of seeing and being. Although ripe with diverse subject matter and symbolism, Rødland’s photographs are united by the way they ask viewers to confront that which makes them uncomfortable and sit with this discomfort to explore its origins – asking what this feeling tells us about society, about ourselves. In connecting contemporary provocations to inherited forms, Rødland makes us question the meaning and acceptance of certain subjects and symbols in society.
The GreyChurch Billboard is generously supported by Jane Irwin and Ross Hill, and the City of Vancouver.
