Pia Anonsen Rognes

Seeping through the camouflage of my pale skin, my soft words

17 January - 10 March 2019

The exhibition consists of sculptural works in textile materials and techniques. The artist's use of metal foil fabrics, faux fur, and a sharp colour palette offers conflicting cultural associations. Glossy pink and purple materials are opposed to truncated bodily shapes and play on an aesthetic reminiscent of plastic toys aimed at little girls, while simultaneously pointing to the sex industry and plastic sex toys.
Through these contradictory associations, a contorted physicality is explored, where the inner life, emotions, and drives are outside the body and expressed through shape and surface. The wrongness of this physicality is significant, the shape of the sculptures resemble something living but seem to be growing in a contorted way, and to be missing recognizable parts. The works are in conflict between plastic and body, between attractive and uncomfortable.
A parallel is drawn between the sensory experience in the encounter with negative and positively charged associations and emotional experience - the idea that drives such as violence and self-destructiveness paradoxically contain a tenderness.
The artist is looking for a language for the unsaid, unseen, and shameful that can grow in the darkest places of a being - aggressive beasts that are unacknowledged, but still cultivated with tenderness.

Pia Antonsen Rognes (b. 1986, Trondheim) graduated with a master's degree in visual art at Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavik (2014), and with a bachelor's degree in textile at Bergen Academy of Art and Design (2012).
In 2015 she received the débutante prize at the 39th. Trøndelag exhibition for the work "As they believe my lying body", and in 2013 she received the Craft Prize at The Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts annual exhibition. In 2018, she presented the solo exhibition "Desiring Violence" at Trøndelag Centre for Contemporary Art in Trondheim.