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PAPER PLANES
2020 - 2022
The work series Paper Planes originate from the idea of hand folded paper planes as a metaphor for movements in space. Through these two series of work, Laila Svensgaard examines the fundamental principles behind light exposure and spatial dimensions.
Paper Planes I - III consist of a series of photographs, created by folding light sensitive paper into basic shapes of paper planes, which is then exposed to a source of light. In a large frame, small photographs - all folded identically and exposed to the same amount of light – in a range of different abstract and minimal photograms are neatly arranged, showing all the outcomes of the photographic experiment. The piece highlights the multiple variables that light exposure entails, and the works hereby unfolds the ungraspable aspect of lights eternal, abstract and ambiguous nature. Each photograph differs from the next and light appears from all angles, giving a certain rhythmic reading for the eye and mind.
The piece operates on two aligned mental levels, where you as a viewer both question the process of photography and your own subjective way of perceiving visual information. This position between our visual perception and reality is a reoccurring theme in the works of Laila Svensgaard, where the small experiments are like magical activities that pull our understanding of image making into new dimensions. Culturally we understand the photographic as a system of information and classification, ranging from sequences pasted into family albums, to photographs used in weather forecasting, astronomy, microbiology, geology, police work, medical work or used for military reconnaissance, yet Svensgaard investigation of the photograph is opening up the aspects of photography’s material that we never see at all, exposing all indeterminable elements embedded in the perception of the photographic. The rational aspect of photography is turned into a magic science, investigating how we perceive through our sight and how truth can be undermined in experimentation, opening up new intellectual and philosophical thinking.
Iben Elmstrøm, 2020
Photos: Ole Jørgensen, Laila Svensgaard