EN: “A soft shiny star city is the city in the sky, the city on the ground, the city in our minds, the city that we feel. It’s all the things you cannot see – it thinks, it hums and it dreams. An assemblage of leftovers from last night’s dinner with some new ingredients from today. The illusion of the mapmaker. Seeing is not the same.”
Father and daughter duo Øivin and Elvira Horvei live and work in a city. By combining their individual methods of organizing experiences, they envision new ways of perceiving saturated environments. Elvira’s analog photographs of self-made sculptures made of plastic bottles and Øivin’s abstractly painted canvases structured in the form of awnings blend into a visual dialog that makes up an imagined cityscape. Situated in both rooms are two viewing boxes constructed using mechanisms of reflection that propose a certain way of looking before one is presented with a representation of a city, not a city itself.
Elvira Horvei is an interdisciplinary artist who uses self-made subjects to reset visual and conceptual points of reference within the frames of analog photography. Her process begins with making sculptures, deconstructing and reshaping everyday objects, changing their physical forms, adjusting their textures, and painting new visual affordances. These sculptures are the subjects and elements of composition for her photography. All abstractions and color are done in-camera with no post alteration or editing. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design (New York City), has shown work at Sheila C. Johnson Design Center (New York), Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (Boston) and Uncanny Gallery (New York), and has been an artist in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Øivin Horvei is a self-taught artist working with material familiar to the quotidian day-to-day of the everyman, creating intriguing visual vignettes that challenge the viewer. With a focus on composition and improvisation he uses surreal manipulation of figure, form, executed with his abstract handstyle to create big picture reflections on the fluctuating spirits of all the cities. He has shown work at Wallworks (NYC), Gallery Steinsland Berliner (SE), Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien (Berlin), Beach London (UK), Overgaden (DK), 0-0 Gallery (LA), Röda Sten Konsthall, Tegnerforbundet, Galleri S.E, Noplace, Kunstnernes Hus and Kunsthall Oslo among others. He has been featured in numerous books and publications including The New York Times and Juxtapoz Magazine.