Anna Clawson

Dates: 08.03. – 14.04.2024
The gallery will be closed for Easter, 27.03 – 31.03.24.
Opening Hours: Thursday and Friday 15-18, Saturday and Sunday 12-17.
Location: Atelier Nord, Olaf Ryes plass 2 (entrance from Sofienberggata).

Please join us for the exhibition’s opening on Thursday March 7th at 19:00.

Leftover – handover – hungover

What happens in the gap between the story and its eventual emptying out of context?

In her exhibition The Long Hangover artist Anna Clawson brings together a series of works which appear as scraps or leftovers, a piecemeal assembly of odds and ends that indicate faded or dismantled political projects of the recent and not so recent past.

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Standing in the moonlight of an electronically lit ‘midnight sky’ The Long Hangover transports the viewer into a landscape that has lost its sense of scale. This can be experienced directly upon encountering the installation …into bed 1903-2023 (2024), in which defunct flashlights are arranged in piles resembling kindling, akin to glowing embers. Scenic route (nudged-shoved-pushed) 1903-2023 (2024) is a 35mm slide projection documenting the rear ends of these flashlights. Arranged chronologically from oldest to newest, these circular and moon-like images map the spread of flashlight technology across the world, beginning with its invention in 1898 by British inventor David Misell. Here the gap between the micro and macro, between the individual hand-sized object and its spread over vast geographical distances, is brought to life.

Echoes of a sliding tonal scale, recorded from an Arp Schnitger organ located in the Hauptkirche St. Jacobi in Hamburg, circulates along the edges of the gallery. Originally a Roman Catholic church, St. Jacobi’s denomination changed to Lutheran in 1529 as a result of the Protestant Reformation. Moving up and down in scale but always clockwise, the sound follows a forward motion that wraps itself around the gallery space and its occupants. The act of capturing and reproducing the organ’s sound can be seen as a domesticating gesture that perhaps mirrors the decline of the grand narrative of the organ as the voice of God. In the 19th century the invention of the steam organ relegated the instrument to the centre of children’s carousel rides, while today the organ is commonly encountered in horror film soundtracks.

Anna Clawson (b. Donaghadee, N.IRE) is an Irish artist living and working in Oslo, Norway that graduated with an MFA in Fine Art from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2023. She is an alumni of School of the Damned (2017), an autonomous free art school in the UK. She received her BA in Fine Art from University College Falmouth, UK, in 2009. Anna works in both analogue and digital media in installation and sculptures, on her own and as part of a collaborative duo Clawson & Ward, with Nicole Ward. 

The exhibition is supported by Kulturrådet and Norske Billedkunstnere. 

Special thanks to Craig Jackson at Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast for sound assistance, organist Florian Stölzel at Hauptkirche St. Jacobi in Hamburg, Nicole Ward, Pauline Clawson, Belladonna Paloma and Lina Mariann Friis.

Curated by Ida Lykken Ghosh.