Solveig Settemsdal. OK SWALLOW GREAT, 2020.

OK SWALLOW GREAT is a video artwork that explores the connections and disconnections of physical and digital realities. Real footage from the deserts of California explores man-made structures bracketing water juxtaposed with Google 3D algorithmic visualizations, and the membranes between these are pierced through text, interrogating what happens between these versions of reality. 

The opening of the exhibition marks the start of the Norwegian artist's two-month residency at the RIXC Baltic-Nordic Residency Program supported by Nordic Culture Point, during which Solveig Settemsdal will create a new video artwork WAVES. The video artwork will be created using data and video from the Irbene radio telescope, recordings of conversations with scientists and local staff living and working at the Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Centre, and environment sounds. 

The OK SWALLOW GREAT exhibition will be on view at the RIXC Gallery from February 16 to March 28, 2024. OK SWALLOW GREAT explores the connections and disconnections of physical and digital realities. Real footage is juxtaposed with Google 3D algorithmic visualizations, and the membranes between these are pierced through text, interrogating what happens between these versions of reality. The film was shot during a research trip looking at man-made structures bracketing water in the deserts of California.

She followed the waterways and the Colorado River, whose man-made irrigation canals overflowed in the 20th century into the Salton Basin creating the Salton Sea. Both the Colorado River and the Salton Sea are heavily polluted today, with runoff from nearby farms containing fertilizers, heavy metals and toxins. With water supplying much of the southwestern US, both the Colorado River and the lake are drying up and the wind is carrying away the dried-up and toxic sand of the lake bed. The artist contrasts these ecological disaster zones with the wealthy oases nearby, filled with man-made structures.

The text in the artwork provides links and distortions between footage, delving in and out of the real and the virtual. The videos are unsynchronised, allowing new connections to form between word and image at every loop.

Solveig Settemsdal is a multidisciplinary artist working across mediums including sculpture, video, photography, drawing and sound. Her practice studies the fluidity and transience of materials alongside how objects and ideas transform over time, through analog and digital media.

She was born in Norway, did her art foundation at Strykejernet Art School in Oslo and has been based between Norway and the UK since 2007. She completed a BA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2010 and an MFA in Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2018. She received the Jerwood Drawing Prize for her video work Singularity in 2016, the first video to win the accolade. 

Selected exhibitions include Timescapes, Schtager&Shch Gallery, London (2023), As Far As My Eye Can Sea, Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall, Arendal (2021), Entangle, Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden (2019) CURRENTS New Media Festival, Santa Fe, New Mexico (2022) AI: Das Andere Ich, Ars Electronica, Linz (2016) Oceanic Feelings, Landesmuseum Darmstadt (2019) Sonica Festival, CCA Glasgow (2017) Imagine, Gippsland Art Gallery, Australia (2018).

The exhibition is on view at the RIXC Gallery, Lencu iela 2, Riga, Latvia, from February 16 to March 28, 2024, Wednesday-Saturday, 12:00-18:00.

Contact usi: rixc@rixc.org,  +371 67228478 (office), +371 25358541 (Līva Siliņa)

Supported by the Nordic Culture Point, State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia.

RIXC Center for New Media Culture has received mobility funding from the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture to establish RIXC Art Science Residencies.