SOLVEIG KJØK
http://www.solkjok.com
Sol Kjøk is a Norwegian-born artist living and working in New York City. Her figurative images in various 2D media are narratives about interpersonal relationships, all starting out as performances in the nude staged in her Brooklyn studio. Though the initial photographic step is invisible in the end, one could speculate that this performative layer in Kjøk’s creative archeology is driven by a desire to first experience as manifest reality the symbolic content of her own images. Nevertheless, this ultimately silent undercurrent links her work to the dispersive practices, which has become normative and constitutive of much contemporary art. Like rings on water, her performative process also reaches out to touch earlier art historical conventions such as the often sexualized relationship between an artist and – almost invariably – his subject. Without the loud, but historically necessary, protestations of overtly feminist art, Kjøk’s method is a gratifyingly aware, but unselfconscious extension of feminist concerns about the model/artist/viewer relationship. Along her processual loop, which incorporates picture taking, laborious posing and performance, cutting, collaging, rearranging and finally meditative reassemblage through drawing and painting, Kjøk gets to don, all at once, the personae of creator, subject, voyeur, benevolent dominatrix, classical female nude, objecting feminist, and the subject of self-portraiture.
Solveigh Kjok participates in
Mirror at the Bottom – artists portraying themselves
curated by Agricola de Cologne