in the field of the other and screen
In the field of the other, a video installation by Brit Knudsen-Owen, emanated from an atte povera sensibility. The 'other' of the title refers to a realm of art which is not lofty and ideological, but is gentle, deriving its humble elements from nature. In this 'other' realm it is movement, not stagnation, which is the defining property of matter. The movement I perceived in the installation was the saturation of the grounds of fibre by vegetable dyes, and the movement of these dyes through the absorbent rnatter. Knudsen-Owens installed her work in two roorns, a blue room which expanded into an orange room. In the blue room a video monitor was placed centrally on a blue cushion with a four-section screen playing blue images. Three blue paintings were installed on the wall behind; and a curtain of crocheted cotton wool , with the blue dye slowly being absorbed skywards, framed most of the passageway into the next room. The video had been shot in the city with a hand-held camera-the artist places herself visibly in the middle of the street to film-and the result partially resembled a security video. The coupling of images of the city with the 'reverie in blue' is part of Knudsen Owen's 'take' on art and its intrinsic connection to the everyday. The blue-indigo paintings were intense and saturated. Unstretched panels like bags, they yield a little, providing an echo of Knudsen-Owens's earlier installation Soak.
The orange room functioned as the inverse of the blue. I passed by the orange-rimmed crochet curtain, where the dye was again moving upwards, and proceeded to an orange monitor on the floor with its orange image. The orange dye