Bubbles, Orbs, Oracles

The exhibition Bubbles, Orbs, Oracles engages with questions that we all too rarely ask ourselves: Where do images come from, what do they represent, and how do they affect us? Artist Jens Settergren is interested in what lies behind imagery. How are images of our times created, and how do they in turn create us? These are questions that Settergren presents to us with his new mosaic works and lenticular prints (which switches between two images when you move from side to side in front of them). Settergren's selection of motifs from bio- and computer technology become enchanted when produced in mosaic versions, where thousands of tesserae create their surface like pixels in modern digital images. The round mosaic works with contemporary scientific and technological motifs, such as micro injections , are luminous and mysterious, reminiscent of imagery of saints and everyday objects from the mosaics in Byzantium or Pompeii. Settergren's large prints of a fetus also acquire a tinge of mystery and desire when the cool digital and indexical image escapes the gaze as one has to move to see the image change, without having the opportunity to see both versions. This tantalizing frustration and curiosity that we cannot gather our gaze in one vision gives the subject – the free-floating fetus – an eerie and science fiction-like expression. Here Settergren works on several fronts - both internally and externally. On the one hand, he examines how images affect us humans, and on the other hand, he creates new images himself, as if in the process to examine how they affect himself, and with the exhibition, also the affect on the rest of us. With aesthetics that span ancient image technologies, science-fiction visions, contemporary advertising language and natural science's clinical representation of the world, Settergren delves into the logic of imagery, perhaps rendering the works as a kind of fuel for our unconscious, collective, aesthetic memory.