Simon Dybbroe Møller

Simon Dybbroe Møller, Dance of Light, 2009, Still frame, 160 slides, 2 slide projectors, sound, Courtesy Andersen's Contemporary, Photo Anders Sune Berg

August 28 – September 25, 2009

Andersen Contemporary, Copenhagen - Denmark

 By Cara Despain

 In his usual referential manner, Simon Dybbroe Møller presents a relatively obscure homage in two recent works on display at Andersens Contemporary, Copenhagen. Like an art DJ, his work takes snippets and remixed aesthetics to deliver a reconfiguration of art and/or culture and its prior notions—using a filter that reflects his own individual take as an artist.  A twist within a twist, the two pieces exhibited at Andersens refer to themselves referring to something someone else did. In this case it is Sophus Tromholt—a Nordic mathematician who attempted to photograph the aurora borealis in Norway in the 1800s and, upon being unable to do so, instead published a drawing of his observations under the guise of a photo.

Møller’s reconstructions highlight Tromholt’s technically failed attempt, and also present this natural and intrinsically beautiful phenomenon once removed. The first piece, Only Particles, Some Fast Some Slow (to Sophus Tromholt),is a collage of photographs of Tromholt’s drawing that have been cut into tangrams.  This new arrangement points to both the desperate original false photo and Tromholt’s work as a mathematician, and perhaps returns some strange honesty to the endeavor. Concept aside—which is Møller’s contribution to the work—Tromholt’s aesthetic, where the drawing is concerned, holds its own; whether intended to be viewed as art or not.

The second piece, Dance of Light, is removed from the actual northern lights by one more step and is purely Møller’s creation. Setting the impression of the lights to ballet, and subsequently photographing it, he creates a moving, layered version of trapped solar particles using two slide projectors in a black-box project room. The stills of the dancers, seen individually, reveal their colored unitards and give an indication of their individual movements. Taken together, the slides of the dancers in blurred motion blend with the body positions of the others (the images from the two projectors overlap, and alternate—switching every two seconds) to create a literally dancing reproduction of the aurora not unlike time- lapse footage of the northern night sky. This visual play—an effect he has fabricated with a semi-scientific seed—is another concept that repeatedly surfaces in his work.  It is a methodical and calculated redux.

The created, pseudo-scientific phenomenon of the works experienced in the dark of the space generates a new observation—a very humanized version of the aurora. After all, Tromholt was perhaps best known as an ethnographer; and it seems that to a certain extent, Møller artistically functions as the same.

 Cara Despain is an artist and freelance art writer from Salt Lake City.  She received a BFA from the University of Utah in 2006, and has recently been traveling and working from Salt Lake, Berlin, and Miami.