Torbjorn Rodland: Sasquatch Century

The richly illustrated book presents Sasquatch Century, a mid-career survey of Norwegian artist Torbjørn Rødland. Since the mid-1990s, Rødland has interpreted visual culture in an entirely distinctive way. This exhibition takes viewers into Rødland’s enticing and ambiguous visual language through a broad selection of his photographic works from the past twenty years. Sasquatch is the name of the elusive, hairy, humanoid creature popularly known as Bigfoot. The Sasquatch has been solidified in mythology and popular culture through a simultaneous belief in and denial of its existence. As such, the enduring phenomenon embodies many of the artist’s interests in activating the tension between myth and reality, between the familiar and ungraspable, and the constructed and authentic. With an incisive photographic consciousness, Rødland takes on subject matter and motives that have often become cliché-ridden and drained of their symbolic power. He reactivates them, often with very unnerving results. Despite the works’ immediacy, there is always something more – an underlying self-awareness that is difficult to pin down and prompts both self-awareness that is difficult to pin down and prompts both self-doubt and curiosity upon encounter.