Norweigian-born artist Gardar Eide Einarsson's third solo exhibition at Team Gallery, entitled, Sorry If I Got It Wrong, But Something Definitely Isn’t Right, will run from 07 June through 27 July, 2012.

 

Through re-contextualization, Einarsson endows adopted elements of cultural ephemera with a political charge, attempting to transform a battery of neutral art materials into signifiers of dissent. His appropriated sources vary from book cover graphics, to institutional architectures, to mail-order catalogues, police instruction manuals and everyday objects, and become, in effect, his stolen property, having been rendered his with a strict black-and-white palette. 

 

For the artist's latest exhibition at Team, most of the gallery’s floor space is occupied by the installation Big Barricade (New York City), a colossal pile of hundreds of repurposed automobile tires supported by spear-like cast resin bamboo stalks. The piece is inspired by the civilian barricades erected on Bangkok’s streets during the bloody anti-government riots of spring 2010, but are also symbolic of any battle, physically realized or not, between rebels and oppressive systems. Barricade calls attention to the institutionalization of violence and, by implication, the governmental sanction thereof. 

 

The artist has made versions of this sculpture for Los Angeles, Stockholm, and Basel, locally sourcing the tires for each city. Einarsson’s sculpture, whenever enacted, acts as a symbol of resistance, blocking entry and frustrating movement.

 

Source - Team Gallery

Jack Smylie