Mats Adelman, Deborah Ligorio

23 April–5 June 2005
Opening Friday 23 April 7-9pm

Signal is pleased to present Mats Adelman, Malmö and Deborah Ligorio, Berlin/Milan, with the exhibition Strange. Familiar. Places.

The title of the exhibition alludes to the strange sensation that one can experience when finding oneself in a hitherto unknown place that, nevertheless, seems somehow familiar. Where does this familiarity come from and which comes first – one’s own experience or the construction of how something is?

In Strange. Familiar. Places. Mats Adelman shows wooden sculptures, watercolours, drawings and washes that, together, form a world of their own which is in some way familiar to the viewer; a world that exists in nature and in the no-man’s-land of factories and abandoned sites. Animals, most particularly birds, are depicted in Adelman’s work with great detail and precision. Their surroundings and situations do not show the same regard for realism or exactitude but tend towards fable or poetry. Fable makes itself felt in an unreal, foreign dimension of something that we sense that we know very well. Perhaps it is nature as we believe that we know it but with elements that are not usually understood and that seem to belong to another world.

In the film “Donut to Spiral” (2004) Deborah Ligorio approaches the landscape from another direction. On her journey through the desert to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Great Salt Lake, Deborah Ligorio travelled through a landscape she had never visited before. In spite of this, the unknown seems unusually familiar and the magnificent landscape is difficult to grasp as really existing in that one’s experience of it is overshadowed by associations to backdrops from films and computer games. The journey to Great Salt Lake becomes a sort of cartography of a landscape which is already familiar to us through pictures, narratives and memories.