The Naxal Belt is pleased to present “To the Neon God They Prayed,” a solo exhibition of Yngvild K. Rolland. An Oslo-based Norwegian visual artist whose work often deals with the paradoxes of signage, Rolland often uses signifiers against themselves or against their circulated socially-conditioned meaning. Her brusque use of text in both site-specific public installations and sculpture is imbued with an enigmatic incandescence, seeming to short-circuit all reality, rationality and “common sense.” Indecipherable, though not wholly impenetrable, these non-sequitur phrases of abrupt vitality seem to impart a mystical neon-age supra-knowledge that we only dimly perceive but cannot totally understand. Destabilizing the demarcation between “langue” (system of language) and “parole” (specific use of speech), these sphinx-like aphoristic “word mashes” use text as sculpture, playing upon repressed meanings in idioms we take for granted, reformulating their syntax both idiomatically and visually, to bluntly unexpected results.
Rolland’s work has been exhibited internationally and in Norway in both group and solo exhibitions, at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw), Botkyrka Konsthall (Sweden), Point Ephemere (Paris, in collaboration with Manifesta 7 and Raqs Media Collective), the Grimmusuem (Berlin), 0047 Gallery (Oslo), Maria Veie Gallery (Oslo), Akershus Art Center (Oslo), and Leif Mange Tangen Artspace (Norway). Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Porsgrunn Kunstforening and KinoKino in Norway in Fall 2012. She has been the recipient of grants from Vederlagsfondet (Norwegian Visual Artists Association) and the Scandinavia-Japan Sasakawa Foundation. She received her MA from the National Academy of Arts in Oslo in 2006.
“To the Neon God They Prayed” is curated by Andrea Liu as part of a two part program at the Naxal Belt during Bushwick Open Studios called “Inappropriate Speech: Take Artists Space Revisited.” Open June 2nd and June 3rd 12-7PM.
http://artsinbushwick.org/bos2012/directory/?listing=7559