We are  proud to present our new venue ELASTIC Rural located in the small community Jädraås in the heart of the region of Gävleborg. With the group exhibition Into Nature, our relationship to nature is examined through the works of John Alberts, Catrin Andersson, Jan Carleklev, Clara Gesang-Gottowt,  Lisa Jeannin, Anna Ling, Andreas Mangione, Jone Kvie, Katja Pettersson and Magnus Thierfelder Tzotzis. In these pandemic times, nature doubles as refuge and threat where encounters with it are based on our personal experiences. But how is nature depicted in an everyday life and a reality, which is increasingly digital and shielded from it?

Several of the works in Into Nature give us the opportunity to get lost in what can first be seen as surfaces: John Albert's detailed and pigment saturated paintings force the gaze to halt; Anna Ling's series Swelling where the image surface oscillates between abstraction and the memory of her childhood on the west coast of Sweden and the surface of of the ocean. Katja Pettersson's new watercolors harbour personal experiences of threat and longing for the sun-drenched cool dark waters of a lake in Norrland. Catrin Andersson work New Ground disintegrates the paper first in order to build a new surface that we are both reflected and lost in. Clara Gesang-Gottowt's dreamy canvases evoke thoughts of other days and the greenness of nature. We are forced to sift through the materials from which the works are made in order to fully see them. Nature is reflected in and out of them, both personal and shared references are keys to decoding them.

We move out into the rooms and are met by Andreas Mangione's reliefs and the sculpture Kaput (Prophet and Present), a severed head placed on a large platethat appears to be made out of the tip of a chopping block. Lisa Jeannin's video Initiation is part of the installation The Master´s Work. There she creates connections to her inner master through symbolic actions  in order to create the philosopher’s stone, a work which leads us into other realities. Magnus Thierfelder Tzotzis’ video workIn time lightbrings us to the present and to observations of everyday actions that affect our future, the summer sun reflecting in what looks like a cracked mirror. A smallriverof water in Stream describes water's and our own cycle; and man's over-reliance on the fact that we can just continue to fill and pour our water without consequences. Jone Kvie's sculpture series Second Messenger is made of basalt rock and packaging waste cast in aluminum that contain the elements we carry within us in our central nervous system. Hero´s Helmet is an abandoned space helmet with an open visor, located outdoors in the atrium courtyard. How do we look at space in relationship to nature in our absolute vicinity, the grass, plants and animals. The fear and threat from space mixed with the need for a spirit of discovery, which we also have in the face of our close nature, makes you feel Major Tom looking down from his Odyssey. Lisa Jeannin’s Hobospider rests in the protection of greenery seemingly exposed but with a sense of harmony and mutual respect to nature.

Several works seek technical solutions and human experiments that reshape our surroundings like Catrin Andersson's Landlover I-IV. It is like illustrations of how the sea eats up land, while humans unearth the seabeds to build the next artificial island or glass facade. Andersson's work New Ground describes a new material that is created by capturing CO2 and compressing it underground, to then create building blocks for new houses. In Apparatus to attract LUNAR HUMIDITY SPIRITUS MUNDI, Lisa Jeannin collaborated with Rolf Schurmanns to create, interpreting instructions and old images, a machine to capture and create an extract of the world soul and the state of the earth.

Jan Carleklev´s mechanical, White-backed woodpecker no. 17, allows technology to imitate nature. An engine and a resonant box which, by imitating a woodpecker, reshapes our surroundings and is perhaps even in harmony with it. How do other woodpeckers react to this new individual? Is the answer that when a species is threatened to the brink of extinction, we feel a need to create a digital replica? Can we be content with that, now and in the future?

On arrival at ELASTIC Rural you first encounter Katja Pettersson’s sculpture Counter Balance. It depicts a cut up tree branch dancing and balancing in the wind on a high stick. Founded on the idea of balance in our relationship to nature. Like a dance with two parties, not a didactic movement but a dialogue, where sensitivity and respect prevails. How will our experience of nature look in the future, can we find a balance instead of striving to return to "the normal"? The new normal will in so many ways need to look different, we must work with nature and not against it, and above all to be in nature.

Ola Gustafsson
Jädraås, July 2020