23/3/2011
Ellie Ga
Milliken, Stockholm
In 2007, the artist was selected to accompany "The Tara", a polar schooner embedded in the Arctic ice. Ga spent 5 months as a crewmember and as an artist in residence. On show works of documentation, reflection and analysis.
Artist's Diary
January 5, 2008: Although we are drifting, the ship's movement is often invisible to the human eye. But sometimes fissures form in the pack ice and it's like following the lines on the palm of a hand to tell the future. I've been lighting up these fissures with our headlamps, like highways illuminating the future, the possible points where the ice might weaken and we could be set free.
Milliken Gallery is proud to present "At the Beginning North Was Here" the first solo-exhibition in Scandinavia by American artist Ellie Ga. In 2007, the artist was selected to accompany "The Tara", a polar schooner embedded in the Arctic ice. Stuck fast in the ice, Ga spent five months as a regular crewmember and as an artist in residence. For the former, her duties included amongst other cooking, caring for the vessel and cutting ice for drinking water. For the latter, she carried out performances related to the experience of the Arctic and created artwork based on her experience. Within a landscape of monotones, snow, ice and sky, everything continuously changed as the boat unnoticeably drifted and rotated in the ice pack. Waiting for the ice to release them, Ga created an array of beautiful, serene, and contemplative works reflecting the environment and its particular conditions, referencing the experience in maps, charts, photographic records and objects.
A series of charcoal drawings titled "Logs of Limits (Snow Walks)" represent the crew's hikes around the ship. Lodged against a giant block of ice, they would trek their immediate surroundings. Slowly however, as the boat drifted south, minor fractures surfaced in the ice and later, larger cracks appeared. Sometimes the crew was able to circumnavigate the boat, other days walk only a little and occasionally not at all. Their world expanded and contracted, back and forth, up and down and the drawings chart the limits of their world. A drifting ship in the Arctic creates a capricious condition in which time and place is fickle and ephemeral. The experience also conjures a 19th century human desire for adventure and heroism with comparisons to William Shackleton and other explorers who ventured to Antarctica or The Arctic.
Darkened, limitless but simultaneously restricted with a constant alteration of bearings, being in the Arctic becomes as much about forecasting and predicting as it is about existing in the present. Trying to know what will happen next is key and cracks in ice can tell the future, like lines in a hand. The work "Probabilities" is emblematic of Ga's preoccupation with fortune telling and the future of the boat, of the team and of the expedition's route. In the work, made of stop frame photography existing in the realm between slide show and video, images of coordinates and locations merge with images of card playing and palm reading, all whilst the haunting sound of ice cracking suggests liberty or danger.
The works of art in this exhibition are documentation, reflection and analysis. When the ice released the Tara and their journey came to an end Ga continued to explore her memories and impressions of the adventure. The expedition is translated in the work "Ten Till Two: 10:10" through a photographic process mimicking the layers of memory and forgetting. A series of slides display the polar landscape dissolving between light and dark interspersed with phrases from the crewmembers' personal diagrams defining their location, the glacial night, belonging to no latitude or longitude, and the suspended time of a life spent at edge of the earth.
Ellie Ga was born in 1976 in New York City, and completed her MFA in 2004 at Hunter College. Her work has been exhibited at the Swiss Institute, Galerie du Jour, Paris and Hong Kong, Konstmuseum, Malmö, Sweden and Projekt 0047 in Oslo, Norway. She has presented performative lectures at the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Palermo, Sicily, ICI, Berlin, Bétonsalon, Paris, and in New York City at PS1 and in the Edifying Series for The Bruce High Quality Foundation University. Her artist books are in the collection of MOMA, NYPL and Yale University. Ellie Ga currently lives in Brooklyn.
A fissure in the ice is illuminated by an improbable light disappearing towards a star–but one cannot tell if it is the sun or the moon; a sailboat without sails saved from being devoured by the polar night by the whiteness of a groove in the darkness. The fissure becomes a line of flight, a line of chance, an uncertain axe of unfathomable depth, which guides the eyes towards the unknown, crossing a temporality as fleeting as it is indescribable.
Marcelline Delbecq
Image: © Ellie Ga
Opening: 24 March 2011 - 17:00
Milliken
Luntmakargatan 78 - Stockholm
Opening Hours: Tues-Fri 12 - 5 pm, Sat 12 - 4 pm