Alex Fredriksson / Glass Homes

As a part of the VCA Art Grad Show 2022

Included in the Artsworker Run Space curated by Diego Ramirez

Exhibition dates: 24th November 2022 - 1st December 2023

Words by Hunter Smith

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Glass Homes - installation view

Alex Fredriksson, 2022
Framed chromogenic prints, glass bricks, structural pine.

It's easy to imagine a phantom drifting through Alex Fredriksson's skeletal pine and glass brick structure and occupying a place on or in the entombed photographs of in-flux encounters with the world. However, Glass Homes is not a haunted house. Fredriksson's ghosts, rather, occupy the intangible mazes of one's mind where memory, psychogeography and nostalgia convalesce to produce impressions. 

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Beach Road

Alex Fredriksson, 2022
type-C print on Kodak ENDURA Premier paper 
96 by 140 cm

The aptly titled Glass Homes holds at it's core, an aesthetic and figurative focus on the elemental. Glass operates in opposition to its material alter-ego, sand, performing a metaphor in which stability. solidity, certainty and structure come up against the slippery behaviour of sand, malleable and constantly in motion, comparable to the nature of memory. All the more elemental, is the subtle gesture towards earth, water, air and fire through the photographic works Tomb, Beach Road, 501 and Sunset, respectively. Through these works Fredriksson manages to conceal a fully gestated universe within this seemingly straightforward space.

501

Alex Fredriksson, 2022
Framed chromogenic print, structural pine
140 by 96 cm

The photographic impressions distil fleeting and ephemeral moments with a sensitive, contemplative and at times cinematic articulation of light. The viewer experiences images that converge finality, clarity and sentimentality with an uneasiness about the passing of time and the impossibility of preserving a moment. The subjects are grounded in the mundane. A street, an ocean, a sunset and a graveyard could all feel both deeply personal and universal in their ambiguity on the idea of home. Fredriksson’s photographs are void of figures, yet the spaces feel intrinsically human. The viewer is welcomed to implant themselves within the environments and thus the works perform like mirrors reflecting us back on ourselves.

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Sunset

Alex Fredriksson, 2022
type-C print on Kodak ENDURA Premier paper 
96 by 140 cm

The shell of a house that we're invited into inhabits and personifies an emptiness, implied by the timber partition, House Frame. The reductive state of the wall-like structure nods to two bookends in the narrative of a life. It is representative of the period of time before a house is occupied, still smelling clinical and impersonal, as well as after habituation, in its gutted, post-human, abandoned state. The one we might stumble upon in a small town littered with the detritus of its last owners. Fredriksson bunny hops through memory and linearity, evoking something that is all at once flattened and enhanced, distant and within us. This palimpsest, the blurring and layering of impressions, losing and regaining of our orientation in the present refers back to the central condition of the work, the nature of time.

Tomb

Alex Fredriksson, 2022
Type-C print on Kodak ENDURA Premier paper
128 by 104 cm