Anja Salonen
Unknot
May 28 - July 2, 2022
In Lieu is pleased to announce Unknot, Anja Salonen’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Unknot, presents a new series of figurative acrylic and oil paintings that propose permeable thresholds between the body and world, human and nonhuman, primordial and forthcoming. Referencing the mathematical theory of knots, unknots, also known as trivial knots, are the least knotted of all knots; a closed loop without ends, a circle, an opening that’s also a boundary as it forms an interior and exterior. Likewise, Salonen’s scenes of scientific experiments with A.I. alongside imagined architectures of fences, water, and other more mysterious transparent layers question the membrane between subject and object — what is permeable and what is closed.
Considering humans as mammals with ever-increasing technology, the works point to how human motivations are built into machines – always already mediated and preemptively obscured. In a collision of paradoxical systems, Salonen’s exchange between humans, animals, and technology makes gains on truth by engaging their aesthetically confusing intersections in earthly and toxic color-palettes. Following threads of eco-feminism, bio-technology, and a subsequently gendered relationship to machines, figures caught between animal enmeshment and technological advances display heightened emotional states of hypnosis, awe, ecstasy, and hysteria in dream-like non-places.
Probing barriers between nature and culture, Salonen’s archetypal figures with mask-like features relate equally to mice, cows, crows, and dogs, challenging anthropocentric hierarchies. Considering both ‘natural’ and technological organisms from the microbiome to digital networks, discrete entities are portrayed as interlocking pluralities. In a re-imagining of relational structures, power dynamics are highlighted as human subjects fuse with non- human counterparts to explore selfhood’s edges – enough to inspire a reframing of the self as a holobiont, or an ecological assemblage of host and countless cohabitants influencing one another and participating in dynamic interwoven organization.
Rendering dimensionality through directional tinted light, the timeless avatars glow within eerie tension as contrasting neon colors are thrown and reflected throughout. In ‘Emily and Emma; Machine Learning’, a green and orange nuclear glow illuminates a subject, doubled in astonishment, holding an A.I. robot’s head. Moreover, subjects are described as light sources in themselves, as in ‘Green Fluorescent Protein’ (1 and 2) – transgenic lab mice with a bioluminescent jellyfish gene implanted in their DNA, causing them to glow. Just as light reflects off water and limbs, references and meaning often point to something else. A dish of milk shared with a round of rats in Rat Temple Milk might have come from the cow’s milking machine with a female figure arched over an obscured farmer’s knee in Hysteria. Wading through entangled and paradoxical systems, Unknot cycles through feedback loops attempting to untie a rope with no knots.
- Marie Heilich
