Amici presents works by Merete Vyff Slyngborg and Anna Margrethe Pedersen dealing with the migration of their day jobs into their art practice.
Currently Merete’s main source of income is her freelance job as an interior stylist installing furniture, patinated vintage uniques and tasteful artworks into an ambient image collage. Through this job she comes in contact with various disciplines that she sources and integrates in her practice.
Oscillating between seemingly random doodles and the pathos of the artist, some of the most recent pieces by Anna Margrethe are autobiographical slips of the mind made during her job at a gallery. The doodles that emerge come from an out of focus state where thoughts wander off and make conspicuous characters surface. Elevating these drawings from the notepad to the canvas functions both as a comical comment on the rather old school concept of the ingenious artist who struck by a vision has to put it out in to the world. At the same time the drawings recognize and celebrate these slips of the mind as an alley to the obscure one cannot plan or force.
The pieces by Merete imitate the artist’s studio. Through a large paint brush, a custom up-art pillow, and a table made from a blank canvas, this interior set-up functions as a co space in between fields and methods from where the artist works today.
Reciprocal dynamics between art and trend, as well as object and representation are hereby brought to the foreground. By this it addresses how we value and conceive objects in a transitory field between working fields, displacement, interpretation and transition from 2D to 3D.
In Amici the set-up circumvents itself by this very self-proclamation. Does artistic autonomy exist? And perhaps more important, do we even want to go there? Inevitably one practice seeps into the other. With this constant fluctuating in and out of focus, money job and artistic practice, Amici is a humorous play of existentialist self reflection that extracts joy and privileges from the tediousness of work as well as celebrating the premise that everything exists on top of one another.
Anna Frost 