Elza Kayal Gallery is pleased to present The Jaguar in the Mirror by Anne Katrine Senstad. In her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Senstad brings together work from several bodies of work examining existential inquiries poetically interlaced between the conceptual, the critical, and the sensory. 

Senstad returns to the color blue as metaphor and alchemical material, following her lifelong dedication to light, space, and color, where the ephemeral mirrors the infinitesimal, geometry opens the window to the perceptual. In The Jaguar in the Mirror, Senstad permeates the ordinary. With the title, extracted from Robert Smithson’s 1969 text, Mirror Displacement 1-9 – Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatán, she reflects on the paradigms of humanity against the loss of our timeless soul in Levi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind. Justice escapes our contemporary era and the ability to sustain an ecological balance, where nature has become the ghost in the mirror. In Smithson’s Yucatán, we find that the occurrence of nature is a force of ecological mysticism and as well as a tangible otherworldly presence that enters through the practice of art as a ready-made passage to the underworld. 

The central work in the exhibition, The Chiasm, is a Cobalt blue neon light and mirror sculpture installation with the semblance of a deconstructed manifestation of Constructivist Taitlin’s Tower. Senstad utilizes utilitarian, ready-made materials, construction scaffolding aesthetics, and copper plumbing parts, reflecting the sacred in the ordinary. The installation acts as a portal within a confined space, a structural void. 

In dialogue with The Chiasm, the audio-visual trilogy Chiasm of Lament, is a projection and mirror placement installation, reflecting concentric form into the gallery space. Here Senstad works with both analogue and digital technology as methods of deconstructing the liminal spheres of technology and generative information that has been given spiritual and existential power. Form and movement are reduced to a language of glitches, sparkles, and flickering, harkening to early space imagery, noise, and distributed signal error. 

Likewise, with the neon text work Mal Educación, Senstad realizes her own characteristic form of Wittgenstein’s language-game and word-meaning, a space where language is defined by the actions through which it is woven. Mal Educación is a word-play of the idiom Mala Educación, as well as a nod to Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar's 2004 film, Bad Education, depicting the nature of oppression of institutions of power over the disenfranchised and marginalized. Illuminated by Almodóvar’s cinematic acuity, Senstad’s work looks at how critical discourse can be explored through the lens of philosophy, aesthetics, and linguistics as expressed by the sensorial and experiential languages of light, space, and color.