Kim Laybourn
THE SIGNIFICANT OTHER
Do you see the stone grow? Fluid rock, roaming freely, unbounded. Smooth, super fluid. Spills and bleed spells. Never-ending, ever-changing, lacking definite form, unorganized body, fluid stratification. Moving hillsides, secretive forms appear.
‘The Significant Other’ is the first solo exhibition of Danish artist Kim Laybourn. Reconfiguring the space of the gallery into an immersive video installation, the work consists of a series of sequences portraying a cultivated landscape. With ultra-macro recordings of miniature landscapes and cultures, consisting of rot and decay, the video places the landscape in the center stage, as the actor, and not as a passive background. The blind spot within the very eye, what Goethe calls the “ghostly” place, where no object is reflected. Using a number of filming and montage techniques developed specifically for the work, the aim is to speak the unsayable, to sense, to communicate with the The Significant Other, that owns neither language nor mind.
‘The Significant Other’ is a non-perceptual landscape environment, that moves, evolves, transforms at a geological rate incomprehensible for human perception. The invisible aspects of landscapes are as essential to their meaning as those that are visible. The landscape is bursting with invisible life at both the microscopic and geological scales. This immediate micro and at the same time macro landscape is constituted out of a network of past memory and future expectations.
According to geographer and philosopher Augustin Berque, our existence is like the dynamic coupling, a process that results in the “mediance” of human existence in its surroundings. ‘The Significant Other’ is haunted by images of its physical double, co-existing and unfolding at different speeds, overlapping in streams of duration and relational motion. It moves forward to the not-yet and back again to a past that set the conditions for it. A merging or dissolving of time. The flow of an image, in which we find ourselves, looking back and forward at one and the same moment. Being of the moment and in the process, where the duration is measured in terms of embodied experience of place, movement, and memory. A phenomenological landscape is a place “out there”, which is everywhere and at the time, in our surroundings and in our bodies.
Kim Laybourn (1988) is a Danish artist, educated form the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo, from where he holds a Bachelor and Master degree. Laybourn is currently a studio-grant recipient at the one year FKDS and Kunstnernes Hus studio program. Laybourn work in a range of media, spanning installation, sound, text, sculpture, photography, print, animation, CGI and video.
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STRUKTURA.Time is a cross-disciplinary initiative for research and practice within the framework of visual arts, media archeology, literature and philosophy. This five-month programme sprawls across virtual online environments and multiple physical venues in Oslo.
Curated by Lesia Vasylchenko.
