PRIMARY CREATOR: Christine Istad
LENGTH: 01:20
YEAR COMPLETED: 2020
SOUND: Sound from the ocean
SCREENING: Fundação Dom Luis in Cascais, Portugal 2020
Baerum Art Hall 2020
SYNOPSIS: An everyday moment can have something picturesque about it, like a paintbrush gliding over the canvas of life. A moving image consists in effect of visual impressions drawn out in time and is well suited to capturing creation. Painterly elements of film as a medium can be light, space, depth, structure and colours, but also abstraction and simplification. In Christine Istad’s video works we encounter the many nuances of the moment, captured by an artist who can be heartless, voyeuristic, attentive, poetic and probing.
Istad does not seek to beautify her subjects. Nevertheless, she manages to capture their inherent beauty, especially the ephemeral beauty of water and the effects of light. Surroundings are reflected or veiled, muffled by mist and haze, gentle waves on a pond or fragmented against a backdrop of futuristic architecture. What would be better at uniting surface and depth than reflections and transparency?
Several of Istad’s works verge on the visually abstract, with a certain reserved detachment or proximity of detail. Birds and other silhouettes drift through a soft blue mist over the sea.
Text: Oda Bhar.
