Lisa Jeannin
All of our worlds
30 maj kl.10 i Media Auditorium
The artists Lisa Jeannin and Rolf Schuurmans met in Belgium where they lived and worked together for some time. Their common origin is situated in a place somewhere between Holland, Sweden and France, the known cosmos and borderless state of free associations. Now, this living and working together has moved with them to Småland , Sweden where they slowly but surely expand the public’s possibilities to think more freely about life, to share experiences that are otherwise difficult to communicate, that are perhaps impossible to put into words. Equally extraordinary and self-evident things happen in Lisa Jeannin’s and Rolf Schuurmans’ overlapping artistry: mirrors fade and dissolve – surrounding a peaceful and observant gorilla.
A couple is making love, (small, ever so small…) a vast gigantic leaf and gigantic grass in a garden. A skeleton walks around with his welding machine in a wheelbarrow. Someone’s head turns into a lettuce head.Things disappear, get lost, but are found again as something else, in constant transformation. A spider smokes and plays bass, dreams about a film and makes it happen. A many-armed goddess and a sect of trolls with magical powers create growth and rebirth. A house’s façade falls down while the door remains standing. Alternative realities open up to those who might need a wider life beyond obvious structures and norms. Enchantment as a morphological principle mixed with a playfulness, both serious and ecstatic, runs energetically through the artistic couple’s work.
By taking elements from the everyday reality and putting them together in a dreamy and symbolic way (ranging from happy toys and everyday things to elusive threats and apocalyptic darkness) they offer the public new ways to change and re-evaluate. Here also lies a demanding challenge, a pain. With a little luck and a bit of work, life will never be quite the same again. Enchantment stimulates irrational powers that live immediately under and between our thoughts. These powers are reflected as common insight and understanding in the people we meet, an understanding that keeps us human even if that is not what we want to be. However it is not difficult or troublesome to keep openminded when coming across the new perspectives that Jeannin and Schuurmans suggests to us; everybody is wholeheartedly welcomed to participate. However, the participation is not without risk. There is a strong subversive streak in all this, a kind of ongoing revolution through magic and transformation. A revolution that is generous and includes a mental world where it is welcomed. It is about curiosity, the imaginative joy of discovery that also includes anger, destructiveness and the possibility to change. And worrying too. Everything is loss and pain, everything is creation and joy. Changes and enchantments are also comforting, like a cradling, rhythmic, half- sung saga. People’s multi-faceted and contradictory emotional life is taken for what it is.
In this artistic environment it is neither hypocrisy nor mental illness to be very happy and very sad at the same time. Enchantment sometimes makes the circle go round and embrace itself. Existence’s repetitive periods of decay and creation, these relentless and hopeful cyclic movements, circular or spiralling are underlined by the loop of the animation; so even the acknowledged limitations of video art express something. But repetition in Jeannin’s and Schuurmans’ s manifold realities (which alas are also ours) is never static, never unvaried. Everything is living and learning. /Leif Holmstrand