Torbjørn Rødland

Since the early 1990s, Rødland has interpreted visual culture in an entirely distinctive way. This exhibition takes the visitor into Rødland’s enticing and ambiguous visual language through a broad selection of his photographic work from the past twenty years.

Sasquatch is the name of the mythical, hairy, humanoid creature historically viewed as the precursor to Bigfoot. The Sasquatch has been solidified in mythology and popular culture through a simultaneous belief in and denial of its existence. As such, the phenomenon embodies many of the artist’s interests in activating the tension between myth and reality, between the familiar and ungraspable, and the constructed and authentic.

With an incisive photographic consciousness, Rødland takes on subject matter and motives that have become cliché-ridden and drained of their symbolic power. He reactivates them, often with very unnerving results. Despite the works’ immediacy, there is always something more - an underlying self-awareness that is difficult to pin down that prompts both self-doubt and curiosity upon encounter.