Sidsel Christensen, Study for Composition VI

In 2011, Christensen entered the Open Prize for Video Painting, an annual event run and organized by Open Gallery, and was voted the winner by a panel of expert judges. This included writer, curator and contributing editor of Frieze, Tom Morton; Artist-Filmmaker and RCA tutor, Stuart Croft; Artist Director of Site Gallery, Laura Sillars; and the founder of Open Gallery, artist and philosopher, Hilary Lawson.

This body of work is a series of video sequences that portrays a landscape pushed to the borderline of abstraction, where the vertical and horizontal reading is caught in a more free interplay. The series comprises a sequence of twelve video paintings lasting just over an hour. Although possible to view as individual stand-alone pieces, the video paintings have the most impact when allowed to play out consecutively in an unraveling sequence of videos. ‘Framing Sensual Phase Transition’s therefore offers an intense exploration of subjectivity, staged against the craggy coastal settings of Norway, Tenerife and Croatia.

The body of the artist is an element in the landscape and is read as a physical object similar to the mountains and the sea. At the same time the artists’ presence frames the image, as the elements open up the potential for bodily and subjective meaning.

The work is an experiment into balancing modes of manipulation and non-manipulation of the video image. The natural environment is left to  unfold in front of the video camera, where a few insertions in terms of  framing and the presence of body and metal structures adds a specific  pulse or tone to how the work engages the viewer.

"I use my body to interact with a landscape that is both familiar and embedded in me somehow, but also estranged and abstracted. The work explores how we frame the world from a distance, how we embody the world, and how we draw up connecting lines between our internal and external landscapes” 

Sidsel Christensen