OSLO: Amy O’Neill: This’s and that’s

This’s and that’s is American artist Amy O’Neill’s first institutional exhibition in Denmark produced in collaboration with artist Gianna Surangkanjanajai and curator Line Ebert. This’s and that’s is the third exhibition in the newly initiated OSLO programme at Den Frie, presenting commissioned solo projects produced specifically for the sub-level gallery. In an architecture of memory, the show delves into reflections on innocence and shadows cast by progress.

Inside the skeletal and reshaped structure of the previous OSLO show, a cinematic tableau of quilts, garments, and figures holding poses fills the exhibition space. The mise en scène is at a primary level both tactile and permeable: The block-patterned quilts are hung to become wall panels as well as backdrops for the attires. Similarly transformative, these textile pieces are all kinds of wearable props such as vestments, stoles, veils, and masks. Sewn into, or printed, drawn, and projected on top of all these surfaces, are mash-ups of figures that include, among others, the TV witch Witchipoo, a Frankensteinian Beethoven, Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli, and Goya’s straw doll. The dramaturgical overlay is the ancient game of snakes and ladders, offering an account of the intertwined contingencies of luck, decisions, and accountability.

On the opening night, a procession-like performance will animate the garments inside the holding environment, thereby completing the installation of the exhibition. The otherwise open choreography centers around the movement of descending and aligns with the intersections of communal actions and vulnerability. A text by commissioned writer Jennifer Krasinski will be read on the occasion and included in the exhibition pamphlet along with a contribution by Line Ebert.

Working mainly with installation, drawing, and film, both as material and form, Amy O’Neill is concerned with (over)determined spaces and symbolic intermediaries that allow the desires of makers and receivers to intersect. And much like other instances of her work, the subterranean staging at Den Frie has an indeterminate temporality, just as concerned with what is absent as with what is present in the space. The garbs’ flatness and the silhouettes’ hollowed bodies point to this a-historicity, which resonates uncannily in the current vertigo of topsy-turvy interregnums and global tipping points.