Artist Blog : March 2015

Arms

Torbjørn Rødland was born in Stavanger, Norway in 1970. Growing up he recalls having a camera always in his hand, and as a teenager a passion was ignited within him for drawing. In 1989 he explored the major of cultural studies at the Rogakand University Centre in Norway. He then began studying photography at National Academy of the Art and Design in Bergen, Norway in 1992. Since this time, his work has been exhibited widely art museums and galleries across the world, and he has published almost half a dozen books. He now resides in Los Angeles.

Rødland's repertoire encompass a wide range of genres and mediums from portrait, landscape, and still life photographs to videography of a variety of human beings, specific place, and objects, as well as some abstract collage-like pieces. Much of his artwork also seems to push the limits of the human body- showing how it can be contorted, and how skin can be drawn on, covered, or changed, and the concept of American vulgarity.

'Arms,' in which the tentacle of an octopus emerges from the sleeve of a woman’s sweater and gently coils around her fingers, seems to be an almost perfect representation of how Rødland generates images that stimulate a feeling of strangeness, yet have an element of normalcy to them. Throughout his pieces he seems to display the assumption that in photography no matter how absurd an images subject matter may be, it always seems to reflect a world that we can understand and identify as our own.

Last Blue Yodel

Golden Lager

Rødland explains, "It doesn't really matter to me how the photograph came into being. The important question is how to see it: how the photograph asks to be read." This is very interesting because although he takes inspiration from his dreams, as well as historical happenings, he still is able to push the limits of what he can do with photography to create a piece that is ambiguous to each and every viewer; even to himself.