Dog Days 4.0 - Øivin & Elvira Horvei

 

Opening: Thu 26 September, 1800-2100
On view: Fri 27 - Sun 29 Sep, 1100-1700
Place: Gamle Munchmuseet, Tøyengata 53, 0563 Oslo
RSVP: here

Soft Shiny Star City

A city of tomorrow is always on the move. Only stopping for a beverage, preferably orange, sparkling, cheap and artificially flavored. Constantly in motion, powering dozens of air conditioned laundromats that always keep clean clothes. Floating like a cloud of mist, resting on water, surrounded by container ships carrying soft dreams of everyday life. Moon tide in, tide pods out. The whole mirage could fit in your hands, but sand leaks through. This city cannot be contained, it’s gooey, stained and disorderly maintained.

A plastic city is covered in signs, telling you what everything is. Signs on doors, stickers on walls, labels on bags, slogans on trucks. This bank is no bank, it’s a storage for discarded phones with glowing screens that still work. This warmth is not weather, it’s sunsets reflected on silver painted rooftops, oil spills in puddles and sunlight ballets dancing on river waves. Bridges, made out of sun melted plastic bottles with torn up labels, and two dimensional storefronts leaning on decommissioned billboards. Nothing is as it seems, but it doesn’t matter. In this city, broken things are glued together and falle structures taped to hold another day.

A crying city has no stars in the sky. It’s open 24/7 with everything you can buy. Spots and lines from stadium strobes are beaming up above. Soundless doordash shooting stars are flashing through the streets. Mega millions of blinking lights, but it’s all upside down. Flickering bright yellow dots sending messages up into nothingness. Missing the lucid past, the citizens made a mirror to cover the sky. Resting horizontally on the skyscrapers like a star blanket - this city is forever.

A soft shiny star city is the city in the sky, the city on the ground, the city in our minds, the city that we feel. It’s all the things you cannot see – it thinks, it hums and it dreams. An assemblage of leftovers from last night’s dinner with some new ingredients from today. The illusion of the mapmaker. Seeing is not the same.

Father and daughter duo Øivin and Elvira Horvei live and work in a city. By combining their individual methods of organizing experiences, they envision new ways of perceiving saturated environments. Elvira’s analog photographs of self-made sculptures made of plastic bottles and Øivin’s abstractly painted canvases structured in the form of awnings blend into a visual dialog that makes up an imagined cityscape. Situated in both rooms are two viewing boxes constructed using mechanisms of reflection that propose a certain way of looking before one is presented with a representation of a city, not a city itself.

Elvira Horvei is an interdisciplinary artist who uses self-made subjects to reset visual and conceptual points of reference within the frames of analog photography. Her process begins with making sculptures, deconstructing and reshaping everyday objects, changing their physical forms, adjusting their textures, and painting new visual affordances. These sculptures are the subjects and elements of composition for her photography. All abstractions and color are done in-camera with no post alteration or editing. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design (New York City), has shown work at Sheila C. Johnson Design Center (New York), Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (Boston) and Uncanny Gallery (New York), and has been an artist in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Øivin Horvei is a self-taught artist working with material familiar to the quotidian day-to-day of the everyman, creating intriguing visual vignettes that challenge the viewer. With a focus on composition and improvisation he uses surreal manipulation of figure, form, executed with his abstract handstyle to create big picture reflections on the fluctuating spirits of all the cities. He has shown work at Wallworks (NYC), Gallery Steinsland Berliner (SE), Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien (Berlin), Beach London (UK), Overgaden (DK), 0-0 Gallery (LA), Röda Sten Konsthall, Tegnerforbundet, Galleri S.E, Noplace, Kunstnernes Hus and Kunsthall Oslo among others. He has been featured in numerous books and publications including The New York Times and Juxtapoz Magazine.

Dog Days (est. 2021) is an annual series of exhibitions presenting artists and projects that reflect the wider spectrum of graffiti, street and outsider art. Featuring original drawings, painting, sculpture, performance, installations, wearables, limited-edition print and zine releases, and more, Dog Days aims to connect the 'street' and the 'gallery' by showcasing artist's studio-based practice in relation to their work in public spaces.

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