Agnes Widbom & Rebecca Digby
Omelette

November 1 - December 21, 2024

Omelette is possible with the support of the Swedish Arts Grants Committee

Omelette is an exhibition consisting of two intertwined video works. The concept is part of an ongoing collaborative series initiated by Rebecca Digby, based on the premise of a projected musician lying under a gallery bench in front of another artist’s piece. The musician accompanies and lifts the other artwork, but also interferes and interrupts. For the concept to work, both pieces have to make room for the other within their very structure.

In Omelette, Digby’s musician pairs up with Blowfish by Agnes Widbom. In Blowfish, we encounter a subject whose body and psyche are porous. Impression, force and matter are flowing in and out, blurring the border between the self and other things. Through a series of enhanced everyday events, we follow the subject’s interactions through the flesh and the breath, through vision and touch. Perception and interpretation are central to the piece, as well as a curved sense of the close and the distant that equates the surrounding to the interior body, the will to the involuntary, and the metaphor to the thing itself.

Widbom’s piece is in a way like Digby’s concept turned inside out. Both deal with interrelationality and dependance; to merge and to disconnect; to cross lines and to have one’s boundaries overstepped - as terms for existing in the world. While the subject in Widbom’s video gazes inwards and outwards, Digby’s subject is where she is, engaging with what’s readily available to her. Her placement under the bench locks her in the specifics of the gallery space and exhibition situation. She is to maintain in a four sided shape with limited physical space and a predesigned social status in the room. She has one task: to perform.

The installation can be seen as a whole from a distance and in part from the bench’s seat. And though Digby’s piece might seem submissive at first, it has a dominant impact both in relationship to the piece it interacts with and the room as such. Occupying the overlooked space underneath the exhibition furniture, it makes use of the bench’s ability to choreograph the viewer’s body. By sitting down upon her, thus boosting her perceived submissiveness, the viewer becomes part of Digby’s imagery.

The dynamics within the process and between the installation entities are not democratic or symmetrical. Rather they are fluid and uneven, uncertain and changeable. But the pieces and installation mechanisms exist under similar premises: They come into being through their relationship to other things.

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Rebecca Digby (b. 1987, Hammersmith) is based in Stockholm. Her artistic practice revolves around interrelational situations, and is driven by the thesis that these can be examined as philosophical objects through art. Her video installations and performances often make use of the relationship between the physical and the virtual, as well as that between the body and the art experience. Dissonance that might appear in these encounters become prisms of absurdity and intimacy - material for musical compositions, stagings and spatial interventions. Digby holds an MFA from the Royal institute of Art in Stockholm and University of the Arts in Reykjavik. She was an artist in residence at SOMA in Mexico City and ZK/U in Berlin. Among other places, her work has been exhibited at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Uppsala Konstmuseum and Österängens Konsthall.

Agnes Widbom (b.1990, Stockholm) is based in San Francisco. In her recent work with video, drawing and writing, she explores the relationship between the body and the senses in relation to its surroundings. In her painting practice, she often works with found images and photographs from her family archives. Agnes studied painting and video at San Francisco Art Institute and co-ran the project space 1038 Projects in 2014. Agnes has exhibited at The Swedish Institute in Paris and various project spaces in Stockholm, Paris and San Francisco. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at Galleri Helle Knudsen in Stockholm in the spring of 2025.

The artists would like to thank the following people for their generous support: André Nordström, Diego Villalobos, Henna Vainio, Ben Leon, Ishan Clemenco, Shirin Makaremi, Meghan Smith, Yami Perez, Anthony Russell and Evan Moring.