Installation of “Northern Dawn” at Visual Arts Center, Austin, TX, 2025 (Documentation by Alex Boeschenstein)
“Northern Dawn” (2025) is an MFA thesis exhibition that explores memory, migration, and the fragmentation of personal history through archival photographs, traditional sculptural forms, and image-based installations. Drawing from a collection of photographs taken by the artist’s grandmother during a return visit to Norway in the 1960s, the exhibition examines how familial narratives intersect with broader questions of identity, landscape, and cultural myths. Through processes of printing, embedding, tearing, and layering, the work challenges the pace of contemporary image consumption, inviting viewers into a space of slowed reflection and tactile engagement. Northern Dawn combines synthetic materials and intimate imagery, reinterpreting traditional Scandinavian craft objects—such as mangle boards and weathervanes—in contemporary forms. Through the integration of collage, fabric, and embedded photographic imagery, wall-mounted works engage in a poetic dialogue around myth, heritage, and ancestral memory.