Katarina Löfström is an artist mainly working with video, although she has a background of working with three dimensional pieces as well as directing pop videos and commercials.
Her animated videos, Hang Ten Sunset 2000, and Whiteout 2001, has been shown in a wide range of contexts, that of course has a large influence on how the pieces are perceived and read. This is also the intention of Löfström - she wishes to challenge the borders between art and design; art and popular culture; or art and kitsch. What happens to an artwork if it is placed in an art exhibition or as a backdrop for an MTV Awards show? Off course the perception of the piece alters, which challenge our preconceptions and our prejudices about art, or about interior-design for that matter. The animations of Katarina Löfström has some close links with painting in the expanded field, but the link to the sound in the pieces are even stronger. The animations are made to match the music, not the other way around, much like how a pop video is made. Therefore, to see any of the videos without hearing the music is like watching a Mondrian being colour blind - you only get half of it. This does not mean that the videos solely are illustrations to the music, and not that the music works as a background-sound for the visuals, but that they are inseparable parts of the final artwork.
Hang Ten Sunset is an animated and abstracted sunset, with a meditative soundtrack by techno artist Plastikman, and gives strong associations to psychedelia and surf-culture.
Whiteout is an animation based on the after-images you get in your eyes after staring into the sun, with music by DJ and performance-artist Terre Thaemlitz.
Katarina Löfström has also made still prints from Hang Ten Sunset, and if one hasn't seen her videos before, one might get the impression of a modernist colour-field painting, or pure minimalism, which is Katarina Löfström's conscious flirt with art history. Some of the prints are made on velvet, and the result gives strong associations to the decorative language of the 70-ies, when velvet prints where common in a lot of homes. One can't help but to wonder what Clement Greenberg would have said about this...?
Power Ekroth
Freelance Curator