Emmy Skensved

Deep Skin @ SNOlab exhibition photos

22 December 2015

Deep Skin is a group exhibition in a particle physics research laboratory that is 2100 metres underground called SNOlab. SNOlab is protected by being underground so that greatly sensitive experiments can go on undeterred by the cosmic rays of natural light and the background radiation of air. Participating artists include Pakui HardwareAgatha Valkyrie Ice,* Bitsy Knox + Christian Tonner, Visualize→Actualize, Antoine Renard, and TROI OI (Nhu Duong + Sung Tieu)

Visiting Deep Skin and SNOlab can result in experiencing vertigo and severe ear pain. It is nice that art is residing in such a place protected, distant and on the interior of something. The context runs deep -of course it does -to protect the particles: highly clean, no dust, some things vacuum packed: like the hair in Paul Barsch’s work ‘BIOBCI-CARRIER’.

Nhu Duong + Sung Tieu, TROI OI (2015) Install view. Courtesy SNOlab.
Nhu Duong + Sung Tieu, TROI OI (2015) Install view. Courtesy SNOlab.

Organisers, Berlin-based Canadian artists Grégoire Blunt and Emmy Skensved who previously curated shows: eStamina and 2nd Skin have also made pieces for the show as well as documenting it. All images are courtesy SNOlab and depict the art works/particles hand-held in close proximity to what presumably is already being used in the lab. ‘LINDA’ (2015) by Agatha Valkyrie Ice, a spray bottle with its name on and white foam escaping slightly out of the gap between the top and the body sits in a small seat with more foam having gently escaped around its base.

Martin Kohout’s ‘SKINSMOOTH VER.(s)’ are versions of clear gloves filled with a wet but hard material inside clear bags folded in various manners around the space. They are not quite hands and it makes it creepy. ‘SHE, A SKELETON’ (2015) by Dorota Gaweda + Egle Kulbokakaite is a silvery enticing object that looks like a fossil and, although it has no face or head, has a backbone and a recognisably amphibian tale. It sits on a much shinier piece of metal. Another piece of hand-held documentation is an image of someone applying on an iPad for a Guinness World Record for the ‘Deepest Underground Art Exhibition in History’. As part of Gaweda and Kulbokaite’s ‘SHE, A SKELETON’ a piece of writing dismantles and remakes an interior inside or elsewhere, like “working towards the seabed, following the steady pace of the sleeping animals”. The words are displayed on a small screen, held by a person and photographed, sealed in the image. 

Deep Skin will be underground for one year from August 14, 2015, to August 14, 2016, protected by and co-existing in SNOlab. It pulls on memory and the preserving power of reminders. It pulls on that which is too clean and precious to be touched – or to touch back – but close enough to remember deeply. In six months time maybe you might think about the sea bed, or dry hair and think about them all down there. **

Exhibition photos, top right.

The Deep Skin group exhibition is on at Sudbury’s SNOlab from August 14, 2015, to August 14, 2016.

Header image: Anna Sagström, GLOBAL ROUNDUP, ROUNDUP® (GYPHOSAT, GERBIZID) (2015) Install view. Courtesy SNOlab.

*Clemence de La Tour du Pin, Dorota Gaweda and Egle Kulbokaite.

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2​nd Skin (2015) exhibition photos

13 October 2015

“They said we’d perfected a second skin”, reads the press release written by Dylan Aiello for Emmy Skensved and Grégoire Blunt‘s 2nd Skin exhibition, which ran between June 25 to July 5 at 8eleven in Toronto. Aeillo writes as though taking a shower with a second skin. The steam and the water “bead off”‘ the “‘epidermal envelope” –it is self-cleaning: “self-regenerating” instead. The end of the words comes with a heavenly moment – thoughts in the shower –when the person with the second skin says they ‘never, ever’ expected to react so well to the anti-rejection drugs. Ahh.

The whole room is bright white, its atmosphere “2.22 μg/m³ nicotine and 0.71 μg/m³ caffeine”.

Skvensed and Blunt presented a digital animation work called ‘eStamina’ (2015), related to the February exhibition of the same name, and surrounded by the aforementioned caffeine-infused fog and nicotine. You can barely make people out in the space from 8eleven’s Facebook photos, sat within the atmosphere: a mix that straight away floats into your head as something intensely addictive, although nicotine does also come in antidote form. The video is comprised of different chapters –like “Chapter Y: YAG LASER”–that go with subtitled texts from several writers and artists such as Bixy KnocksAntoine Renard, Emma Siemens-Adolphe and Viktor Timofeev. One moment Knocks’ text describes, “a distant call to revert to a far earlier reptoid state”. The second skin is the skin we have now, and there is no antidote.

French artist, Clemence de La Tour du Pin made a new fragrance of rubber, metal and Red Bull (‘Untitled’, 2015). The little vials were held onto the walls and windows with see-through bath/shower rubber suckers. Visualise->Actualise made a work called ‘2nd Skin eBook’ (2015), a series of silicone and USB packaging pieces that line up along the wall, all their insides vacuum-packed up against their outside. **

Exhibition photos, top right.

Emmy Skensved and Grégoire Blunt’s2​nd Skin exhibition was on at Toronto’s 8eleven gallery, from June 25 to July 5, 2015.

Header: Clémence de La Tour du Pin, ‘Untitled (Redbull, metal, rubber)’ (2015). Install view. Courtesy 8eleven, Toronto.

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