Ulf Lundin | Still Films
Galleri Magnus Karlsson is pleased to present the fifth solo exhibition by Ulf Lundin.
With the title Still Films Ulf Lundin is playing with the concept of Film stills; a still taken from the moving picture. An image showing a brief moment in a much longer history. Still films is something very different.
During the working process with Still films, 14 photographs all together, Ulf Lundin has been working with both traditional photography and digital manipulation. For each image he has decided on a specific place that will work as a stage setting for his ideas.
With a camera on a tripod he has taken a series of photographs during one day, waiting for the right moment that might add something to the wanted image. He is gathering material.
The next step is when Lundin with the help of a computer puts together different parts of the images to create a compressed manipulated reality. The result becomes a tasty soup where the ingredients have been concentrated to a mixture like hours becoming a brief moment.
“The tableaux of his latest series, whether train station lovefest or childhood skating rink catastrophe, each take on equal dimensions of ecstasy and humiliation. Though inconceivable, they are also recognizable as subconscious projections, even banal. Lundin is able to explode your internal sense of longing by providing it with a consummation perversely surplus to anything like satisfaction. This is what you want, this is what you get.
At their best, the images function as more than illustration by way of metaphor, but rather as a hermetic space of activity – of his making first, of our viewing second, and of conjoined reflection ultimately – that expands the life it exists within. Fractured as that space inevitably is, it also amounts to a workable form of dignity: cleared of any remaining tissue of mystification, photographs can provide the individual with a valid means for reckoning, which in Lundin’s anxious mind is an undertaking always fraught with comedy and pathos.”
From Gil Blank’s text about Still Films.
