We are such stuff as dreams are made on - and our little life is rounded with a sleep by Rasmus A. Hungnes
Rain falls. Roots drink. The Earth nurtures, trunks grow. The wind blows, the branches sway, the sun shines, flowers bloom, fruits fall.
Earth, Air, Fire and Water. The archetypal elements symbolize the creative and destructive potential of the forces – positive and negative. Here, in the field around and between opposites, lies the critical point of Per Christian Brown’s photo-, video-, and installation work.
‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’ Brown’s new exhibition at Sølvberget galleri in Stavanger borrows its title from Prospero – sorcerer, illusionist, master manipulator; an eraser of distinction, of perception and illusion – and his famous monologue from William Shakespeare’s – presumably – final stage play, The Tempest.
A storm is raging, a ship is sinking. Reality and delusion, actors and characters, myth and reality is entangled, fact and fictions, storms are raging, landslides, bomb rain, bullet storms, climate crisis, housing crisis, coasts are rising, cost of living crisis, inflation of the price of life, deflation of the value of life.
And Prospero’s speech to the shipwrecked continues.
‘Sir, I am vex’d.’ Shakespeare’s poetry breaches boundaries and breaks down rigidities of the mind by way of mastery of wordplay and homophony. Ambiguity. Suspended between the visible and the invisible, in a clash of consensus reality and collective unconscious and the apparent and the hidden and the experienced and imagined is where the work of Per Christian Brown hangs and where it is hung, expressing – and giving – impressions of that trembling ambivalence,
an activation of latent forces within the sphere betwixt anima and animus, id and superego, the hidden and the apparent, the obvious and the unconscious, unprocessed, a multi-faceted juxtaposition of perfectionism and raw reality. These are images, they are tangible manifestations of intangible intuitions, something immaterial materialized, uttering a multitude of intangible and unutterable somethings.
Photons diffract through the artist’s lens, a shutter closes, moments are caught and then recalled, (re-)processed by immersion in chemical baths of the dark- room. Pigments, molecule clings to molecule, attach onto surfaces, and in the pictures, lived life and the staged, external and internal experiences, shared and personal realities, vanity and impermanence, and surface and underground unite into higher entities.
‘That which is above is like to that which is below,’ Hermes Trismegistos – supposedly – carved into the Emerald Tablet, the ancient manual of the alchemists of old. And thusly, the engraving continued: ‘and that which is below is like to that which is above.’
The alchemical transmutation of base metals into gold is said to be an encoded metaphor for the unification of the micro- and macrocosm, an amalgamation of our internal and external realities, and when the beholder considers reality as viewed through Brown’s eyes, we see that that which is outside is like that which is inside. And thusly, permission to recognise that which is suppressed is granted to us.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on - and our little life is rounded with a sleep
by Rasmus A Hungnes, 2024