New Work by Ole Hagen
Exhibition: Sat 6th March - Sat 27th March
Mon - Sat 12pm - 6pm
Artist Reception: Fri 5th March 7:30pm
Moonhead 2010, Polyfrustrate the Infoplex, Production still, Orbit
On the one hand, all animate and inanimate things, including humans could be holograms enfolded in a holographic universe, the auto-excitation of a super-complete plenum. Each perceived unit of stuff would be like a cell explicating the whole of a gargantuan body with infinite gaseous, liquid, solid, multi-dimensional and nonlocal appendages, tentacles and antennae. The observer and the observed would be one surface only bifurcated by the fractures of a mirror of holographic proportions and impossible curvatures.
On the other hand, humans live in lumpy container-heads, dragged around by clumsy zombie bodies. They obsessively construct architectural boxes of simple geometries, dividing things into inside-outside abstractions, while stubbornly following the unidirectional gaze of their binocular vision with regards to both the visible and the invisible.
In HOLOGRAPHY for Beginners, Ole Hagen presents a series of simple spatial experiments with material bodies. Humanoid or animal figures, embodied by the angles and structures of the Horse Hospital or by the extension of metaphysical space, bluntly manifest their physical limitations while at the same time carry the early signs of impossible spatial acrobatics that marks the appearance of the holomovement.
Ole Hagen is an artist working with video, sculpture and large scale drawings.
Combining found locations with constructed stage sets, masks and sculpted figures with living bodies, the artist produces interior spaces populated by mute characters. The work evokes a parallel reality of a metaphysical, mental or virtual kind. By equating the animate with the inanimate, the physical with the imaginary, a comical and hyperbolic world emerges that is not far from our own. The artist was born in Norway. He lives and works in London and teaches at BCU Birmingham. Ole studied at the National Academy of Fine Art in Oslo, Chelsea College of Art and Design (MA) and Goldsmiths College (PhD). His last show in London was the group show Multiverse that he curated for Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art in 2009.
