The mirror and the peephole

 
The mirror and the peephole
by Lars-Erik Hjertström
Code Magazine 9
2009

Ylva Ogland (b. 1974 Umeå; lives and works in Stockholm) needed two simultaneous
exhibitions in Stockholm in order to articulate one of her central themes: the home.
One took place in her own apartment; meanwhile, she accommodated herself at
Gallery Brandstrom, where her other show was. A home turned into an art venue, a
gallery space partly into a home. This very simultaneity is at the core of the existence in a home, as well as of her painting – in a Flash art-interview Ogland said she wanted past and future to be present at the same time in her work. Well, that’s exactly the temporality of a home. Space is commonly defined by it’s capacity of simultaneity, but the home is of a different spatiality defined by a strange distance where near and far are contiguous. This kind of space organized the entire gallery show, where two home environments were next to each other, but at the same time also at the extreme ends of the exhibition. A home: a weird kind of space-time.


There is no future at home. One pain-
ting at show in her apartment presents
this futureless time. The canvases are sha-
ped and cut just like the pieces of a torn
photograph, depicting a study of a young
girl. Several instants come together: the
one of the very photograph, of the act of
tearing it up (ten years later), of painting
it (another ten years later), of deciding
to make it public at home and, finally,
of its being there. The experience is clear:
painting and being at home is to dwell in
a time where the present is a gathering
of passed moments. Located in the pre-
sent, the passed time keeps moving back
and forth between other passed moments,
gathering strength enough to make it to
the surface of the present. This is visible in
the painting: the pieces have grown at the
edges so they no longer fit. As if time had
put its layers around them, purely tempo-
ral scars, thereby hindering the restoration
of the image.

A future is needed, as well as a different
space, to get the image together. That’s why
the mirror and the peephole are impor-
tant for Ogland. The mirror constitutes a
strange space without location, “a hole in
reality” as she puts it. It is the vital space of
Snöfrid, Ogland’s mirror twin sister. This
space is not scattered between several mir-
rors. It is the peephole that functions as the
unity of this space, connecting the mirrors.
From two distant points, one at the gallery,
one in the apartment, this space is directly
accessible. Both times, you see through a
peephole onto a painted mirror image of
Snöfrid’s sex, caressed by her hand.


What kind of space is that? The hand
and the sex belong together like Ylva and
Snöfrid do in the mirror: in both cases,
what you see is the result of a auto-affec-
tion (feeling yourself touching, seeing
yourself seeing). Getting in touch with
herself through her own image, she is
at the same time separating herself from
it, the image being in a different space.
Behind the peephole, she is also reaching
out for a future: the erotic image in her
mind, even if a memory, appears as a pos-
sibility and thus belongs to a future. The
second significance of the peephole is as an
immediate connection to the future, not rather
of the image understood as a tender,
synoptic, beholding. That’s why Snöfrid
says that painting “is at the core”.
It is probably from this point, from

out for a future: the erotic image in her
mind, even if a memory, appears as a pos-
sibility and thus belongs to a future. The
second significance of the peephole is as an
immediate connection to the future, not
from a present, but from the continuously
moving passed. According to Kant, auto-
affection has, maybe is, the form of time.
For Ogland, it appears to be masturbation,
not copulation, that is at the origin of
time. At the same time, this form defines
a space of touching, a space that is more
than a surface and less than a volume: a
space being essentially the feeling of the
absolute proximity and inevitable distance
between the touching part and the touched
one. It is the actual space of the mirror, its
interior, the dark tain of the mirror. It must
be in this sense that Snöfrid once wrote
that she is “SPACE-TIME”.

Obviously, there is no other coales-
cence of the touching and the touched, of
Ylva and Snöfrid, of the home and the gal-
lery, life and art, passed and future, than an
intensive one: the existence of something
affecting you momentarily and as a unity.
Not by concepts, not as essences do they
compose a unity, but as existences. For
Ogland, this is the unity of the image, or
rather of the image understood as a tender,
synoptic, beholding. That’s why Snöfrid
says that painting “is at the core”.

It is probably from this point, from
this finally tender experience of the home,
that the unique character of her art could
be understood. Her use of repetition, of
inversions of images, mirror effects, dou-
bles etc. is there to capture the existence
or the intensive character – not the idea,
nor the essence or the appearance – of
phenomena produced in the spatiality and
temporality of a home. But for Ogland,
the home is at the core of the world. †
Lars-Erik Hjertström