25th Feb - 20th March in Gallery 54, Gothenburg Sweden.
I went to see the exhibitions during it's opening night. I went solo to openings that night, and I think I quite like it that way. You obviously meet people either from before or make new acquaintances. But it also makes you and let you actually look at the art because you have to engage in something if not chatting up some old or new faces. My tip to you, it's like the cinema, it can be quite liberating to go by yourself if you are comfortable with it. Openings are more an event of the sort to meet people you haven't seen for a long time or new people you come across along the way in queue for a glass of free wine. In other words, not so much art really. I sometimes like to go to openings as a social event but sometimes I want it to be quiet and just go to exhibitions during it's display in non rush hours so to speak. I always go twice if I go on openings, to get a second impression by the art itself rather than the event.
Oceans of Air, the title which I've translated literally from Swedish. I was captivated immediately by the title which has a poetic ring to it. The ocean is a metafor for the sky this time, ocean in plural Oceans of Air. Referring to when you look out the window up in an airplane and what you can see at times are actually Oceans of Air. This is what you see in Ling's drawings. A scheme with lines that accentuates excerpts of this big ocean. She's not making outlines of fluffy clouds obviously but instead reduced vertical lines that just gets you a hint of the shape the air is forming in the sky. Brilliantly executed, eleven drawings in pencil and ink are on display. They are very quiet and minimalistic to their aesthetics with white frames on white walls. The clouds varies in shades of grey, with a hint of beige in it if I'm not mistaken.
The first two words I scribbled down when I walked away from the venue was silence and isolating. In a venue full of people, chatting drinking and drinking wine, this is what the drawings gave me silence and isolation. It felt just like when you are either up in the air or in a tunnel on a train suddenly your ears are locked and you can't hear properly, that's how I experienced the drawings, but without the uncomfortable lock that sometimes hurts of course. They were open, quiet and changing. Transience as clouds are, Ling captures that quite accurately. They are suggested to be a metafor for the transiency in everyday life, forever changing and hard to get a hold of. And what Anna Ling does is just that, trying to get a hold of something that's impossible to grasp.
Image taken from Gallery 54.
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