Varmt välkomna till Ida Edins examensutställning på Galleri Mejan, Kungl. Konsthögskolans studentgalleri.
Ida Edin
Genom era ögon
Utställning: 26/9–4/10
Vernissage: Fredag 25/9 17.00–21.00
Öppettider: Tisdag–söndag 12.00–18.00
Through your eyes
”As I am painting the photographs that my immediate family have taken throughout their lives I see love vividly, while mixing the paint on the palette, diluting it and carefully placing it on the surface of the canvas. The countless of van dyke brown, ultramarine blue and cobalt violet mixed curls framing my mothers face and the crimson alizarin red on my grandmothers nails. How color and light touches different surfaces. The light beige of my fathers eyelashes, as if mixed by a naples yellow, raw umber and cobalt blue with a lot of white, their endings bleached bright by the sun, glowing the way titanium white can do if placed unblended on the raw canvas. While desperately trying to capture love before it slips through my fingers I get to see through their eyes with my own.
My paintings present a semiotics of love as resistance. It is the language for me in which color tells the story of both the love and violence that my mothers family have lived through. Of what it was like being forced to leave Brazil due to the oppression brought upon them by the military dictatorship and how political exile led them to a Sweden that welcomed them in the 1970’s. However, in spite of being subjected to the atrocities that living under a military regime entails, these references shows their persistence to find happiness. I see it in their smiles, their eyes, their caresses. Their will to create a life in a place were they were not born, but most importantly; to continue living for the love that connects us to one another.
In my process the act of painting has come to carry the emotional weight of love as this form of resilience. I paint the people I love, who love me, using photographs they have taken of each other. I pay extraordinary attention to them, to the colors that define their emotional resilience. But I also think of love as James Baldwin defines it, as a movement and a battle. That battle is the day-to-day practice of showing up to work with the canvas. That is how I show love, make it sensible, work for it, struggle over it. To never forget the sacrifices made for me to be able to spend time with love in this way. Painting, as well as love, is this daily commitment. Because painting does not give itself without that work. Every hour, every minute, every emotion and struggle is the attention that painting and love share. It is a daily reminder that the past and present are ever intertwined and that the struggles of the generations that came before us are the same struggles that we too must fight against as parts of today’s society rapidly approaches authoritarian tendencies once more.
I warmly welcome you to take a seat in the chairs in the exhibition space.
A deep thank you to everyone who has helped me make this exhibitions a reality, your love means more to me than words can describe.”
