Jan Freuchen

b. 1979, Norway

Twenty-six Gasoline Stations consists of found images of gasoline stations blown over by extreme weather. Much as in Ed Ruscha’s 1963 piece of the same name, many of the pictures were taken through a rolled-down car window by disaster tourists or people fleeing from their homes. The T-shaped structure of the gasoline stations represents an archetypical modernist invention, whereas it becomes a primitive shelter when knocked over on its side. The images also create a feedback loop, the damaging winds partially fuelled by the product the buildings were built to sell.

Working mainly with drawings, sculptures and constructions, I create installations with strong formal and thematic connections between the different elements. I see my work as mental maps attempting to determine my position within a global system. Our cultures and lifeforms are presented as unstable conditions, and the artpiece as a ‘risk analysis’ of the situation. Human achievements are reconsidered in the light of a non-linear dynamic theory, where natural processes and the feedback loops of contemporary cultural expressions provide the fundaments. Questions concerning authorship and originality are another central theme in my work. The romantic idea of the artist is merged with a destabilised conception of the ‘self’. References to science, design and popular culture are frequent, and recent art history – notably the ‘poetic’ conceptualism of the 1960s – is often cited. As with the latter, geology and ecology are used as analogies for constellations in contemporary society.

(Text: reading the city catalogue, 2009)