Stian Adlandsvik statement about his work:
My artistic practice springs out of an interest in different economic systems and their consequences.
In my work, I wish for images and sculptures to be read as a direct consequence, or trace if you like, of a certain logic and process, and I wish to further continue this way of thinking around producing.
Central to this interest is production and the logic of trade, how objects are assembled, created and shipped. Often I attempt to find traces of different logistical journeys that products have undertaken on their assembly line and to use this as an indirect image or drawing of the actual system at hand.
These traces are often etched into some sort of material and tell of a (mis)use, or (dys)function in this production system. My belief is that there should be a way to read sculptures and objects through reading how they have been treated, and the logic of their design, what they are made of and which parts that has been used to make them. By being able to read traces of handling and treatment made by the journeys a product makes from factory to your home, one would know more, when buying or selling a product, what it actually is, where it has been, and how it was made.
Our production economy is mainly based on mass production, making replicas of one item as efficient and reliable as possible. But with this economy, and our ever increasing speed of travel and communication, a huge economy of illegal products has emerged, offering buyers an unbranded, faked and extremely cheap alternative to the original. This does not sound like a huge problem for the buyer, unless of course he or she is buying for example airplane parts, or car parts, and important safety measures has been cut off in the production line in order to cut costs, sell cheaper and earn more. Then the illegal trade suddenly poses a danger: first for the system that rely upon for distribution of the parts, but of course much more important and severe they pose a life threatening danger to innocent people unaware that they are using a product containing faked and illegal constituents.
For my residency at Amsterdam Graphical Atelier I want to continue my research on some of these themes that have been occupied with in my work for the last years. I see three somehow different starting points of doing so:
Firstly I want to work further with themes revolving around the original and the copy and see if there is any way I can use graphical techniques in this research. As printing is a way of producing limited versions of an original, I find this to be a very interesting technique in relation to this.
Further I would like to work with printing as a production system or an assembly line. As a way of mass-producing images, graphical printing techniques are very related to a modern mass production of objects.
Silk screening is for example a modern reproduction technique still in commercial use today. For me the actual process of making the print will therefore also be an interesting one, the logistic of the print. To trace the print from its constituents until the print is finished. I would for example like to see if there is a way to let the print techniques produce the image being printed. The previous mentioned traces that can come out of a production system relates to this, and I see myself working further on this while in Amsterdam, and see if there is a way of directly making traces of different logistical journeys and to utilize these in some way as starting points for prints.
The last starting point for my residency in Amsterdam would be to see if there is a way of using the logic of print techniques on sculptures or three-dimensional works. I guess this would be the foundation of the whole residency, as I primarily work as a sculptor, and my main interest is in objects and their physical and material constituents.
I have worked with the printing technique and different forms of destruction. Starting from a blank A4 sheet, I have destroyed it with a paper shredder, patched it together, scanned it and, even though it was without colour, printed it as a full colour silkscreen print. But also in the printing process I have destroyed it by skewing the different layers slightly, so that they are not aligned. This way you get a very colourful image based on a single blank sheet of paper. The different forms of the cutted paper is a result of how the paper has worked together with the machine, and the traces are a result from this "collaboration".
This is connected to the airplane that has crashed and is patched together in the accident investigation board research centre. This airplane crashed because of faked airplane parts that were installed for economical reasons. Here I have taken images directly from the crash report and have printed 3 of the 4 colours needed to make the whole picture (one piece is missing). One of the layers is also torn up and patched together, so there is also several layers of destruction in this images.
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