Psychopomp (2024)
40 Risograph prints in an acrylic glass folder. Edition of 4 + AP.
Folder: 31.5 x 49 x 2.2 cm. Graphic prints: 28.6 x 38.3 cm each. 2024.
Installation images from Moonspace in Stockholm in connection with the release of Sajkonytt #2 (center), a newspaper publication based of Psychopomp via Moon Space Books. Available here
The front (left) is engraved with a crack pattern. The back (right) is engraved with the title, edition, and signature. A folder contains a complete series of the 40 images.
Exhibition text (translated from Swedish):
A psychopomp is a soul guide, an escort to the afterlife. Psychopomp is also the name I had given my mobile phone. After I got it back from repair for a cracked screen, Psychopomp started producing strange photos. The camera showed digital artifacts, glitches. There was a band of thin stripes in different colors along one side and a green-black band that jerked across the image to sometimes split it into a greenish-toned half. The camera also replaced bright white light with fluorescent pink and added a light pink tone over the image in low light conditions. Instead of taking the phone back to the repair shop, I found it beautiful and thought I was lucky.
From the light that passes through the tunnel, the camera mediated between the subject and another way of seeing. Familiar functions are most noticeable when they do not work as they should, but like the odd mutation that gives a creature an evolutionary advantage, a broken function can become a creative opening. A tear in the mesh of ordinary perception.
I spend a lot of time observing and take artistic pleasure in seeing myself see. My eyes are also filled with artifacts. I see spots, noise, and afterimages. Entoptic phenomena that are products of the visual system, like river stones in the stream from which my body renders the world before me. I am drawn to nets, patterns, and filters, and I construct my art accordingly.
Between 2020 and 2023, I took photos, mainly on excursions in Sweden and Portugal, until the touchscreen, which had cracked several more times, started to become unusable. When the screen is replaced, the glitches will likely disappear.
I have transferred a selection of the images to Risograph prints. The images have been layered and printed in shades of yellow, blue-green, fluorescent pink, and sometimes black. The layers have conjured additional dimensions of color. Transformation has occurred from digital to organic, and for the newspaper printing, back to computer and then paper again as a collage.
Like its mythological source, Psychopomp became a guide to something beyond, a world over another bridge. Here are postcards from there.
