Name: Elisabeth Molin

Age: 33

Location: On some invisible highway between cities

Presented works: View Elisabeth's works here 

Website: www.elisabethmolin.com

Astrological sign: Capricorn

Most recently used emojis:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How long have you been showing artwork on the internet?

In 2009 I was invited to take part in an online exhibition called A Place Called Pala curated by Laura Mansfield. The videos each artist showed functioned like screen interruptions on the user's computer.

 

What about exhibiting online interests you?

I find the relationship between the mind and the infrastructure of the internet interesting, as two distinct and highly imaginative systems and in these moments when they collide or become incompatible.

 

I’m also thinking about synonymity and approximation. The photograph as a scientific invention that standardized the represents of vision, how it became this mirror of experience when we actually only see 10 % of our reality, the rest we invent and makeup and previous experience like touch taste and smell constantly alter the images we see. But mirrors are magical and whiteness singles an object out, brings out it features- transforms it, the job of a pack shot photographer perhaps. There is a promise of closeness in an illuminated light and there is a desire to touch the simulations, to scratch the lens or point your beak against it.

 

All artists have been asked to contribute two works for this exhibition. How do your works relate to one another? Is there a specific point of entry or reference that inspired these pieces?

My contribution Phantom Feeling is partly text and partly image. I use text to describe an image that I can’t take with a camera and I use images when language fails me. There are moments where the two leak into one another, confuses one another, and in and of themselves they sit on the edge of their own media and intention. The text builds up and breaks down a mental architecture, the video is reversing itself in terms of time or stretching time. 

 

I wonder what the internet did to the perception of real-time. What happens when we confuse memory with storage?
 

Is there a pop culture reference that illustrates or inspires these worlds? 

I’m inspired by this moment Snow White takes a bite of the red apple and she falls into this infinite sleep mode. It seems reality has taken on this fragmented dream like quality. Borders shift, and there is a sticky sea of images swimming through your neural network. How do we physically process them? Compared to how the body process food for instance. It feels haptic, jungle like, to sip black coffee like gasoline, to smoke a usb vape and eat seedless grapes.

 

In the wake of countless unpleasant realities, do you see escapism and fantasy as critical tools that can allow us to better understand the present?

On the coldest day I walked into the grocery store and found that all of the coconuts had turned white.

 

On the warmest day of the year I was looking over the skyline of the city and there was this giant white steam suspended above the skyscrapers, forming an image of a giant coral reef, just expanding and expanding, like a thought bubble.

 

I’m curious about this; how do you depict a thought? How can you make the imagination leak into a space, like the way you crack an egg open.

 

I’m thinking about the margins on the space the same way I think about the edges of language, as if a ghost just entered and moved things around, and how these acts can point at, perhaps puncture the fictitiousness of the space itself, make it malleable or break slightly.

 

Leon Battista Alberti theorized that painting should act as a window to the world. Can the screen act as a portal to worlds unknown?

The text moves across the page as your eyeballs move from left to right, left to right, perhaps you lose focus, click a page. Perhaps you make a doodle in your mind, perhaps the words or singular letters like S swim through your brain and you suddenly remember this memory of bonfire night, sitting in this yellow light, you feel the heat, you hear the wood going ‘pop pop pop’ and you smell the ashes, and suddenly the smoke seems to surround you, it seems to come from inside the computer keyboard.

 

What are other themes or formats have you been exploring in your work as of late?

Decoys, camouflage, deception

 

A project called COMFORT 7/32/00 that explore touch and intimacy in relation moving image works.

I’m curious about how to create environments for and through video works, how we navigate and act around them and the role of the imagination.