Reality reviewed
By Stine Skjødt Mygind
A photograph is a documentation of the visible reality. Or what? 21-year old aspiring artist Astrid Bryder challenges this perception by showing that photography is much more than a factual representation of reality.
Astrid Bryder often uses the real world as her starting point, though any resemblance to everyday objects seems to have disappeared in her works. By dissolving the actual object and causing it to disappear into nothingness, Astrid twists reality and brings photography into a new dimension that goes beyond pure technology. What is left is an abstract expressionistic aesthetic. We can only speculate about the motifs that have been lost in the photographs, but the imprint of a visible reality is just as real as a fully realistic portrait or landscape photograph.
Astrid Bryder develops her photographs by hand in a color darkroom, where she also experiments with creating photographs without even using a camera. With inspiration from painting, she uses light-sensitive paper as her canvas and she ‘paints’ with chemicals normally used in the photographic process. Sometimes she exposes the photographs to fire causing the heat to slightly burn the surface and thus creating organic patterns in the final artwork. Real or not, you easily loose yourself to the subtle aesthetics in Astrid Bryder’s artistic universe. And hey, what is reality anyway?
CV
Astrid Bryder (b. 1995)
Lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Education
2016: The Art School ‘Spektrum’, Copenhagen
2014-2015: Photographic School, Aarhus
Selected group exhibitions
2016: Out of Nothing, Rendezvous, Aarhus
2015: Summer graduation, Photographic School, Aarhus