Stentor: Elise leidt kijker rond in haar droomwereld (2006) Agnes van Brussel

Elise leads viewers around in her dreamworld

ArtOlive Award nomination gives Deventer artist a flying start

Stentor
by Agnes van Brussel
AMSTERDAM

Thirty young artists, fresh from the academy, will exhibit this weekend in the Wester gasfabriek in Amsterdam. One of them is Elise van der Linden from Deventer. The nomination for the Artolive Award gives her a flying start with exhibitions in Amsterdam, Friesland and Zwolle. Yesterday Floris Kaayk from Breda received this prize from the jury.

As a ten-year-old child she put together a house. It is her own house, complete with the cat and flowers in the garden. She put it on a table, cut a doll and lead it around the house. Elise van der Linden then made her first film with her father’s camera, bird sounds from a CD complete the picture. ‘I am that doll,’ says Van der Linden, ‘and I guide the viewer as a guide around our house. It is very special that I returned to video thirteen years later, while I went to the art academy in Zwolle (Artez) without a clear plan. It was only in the last phase of the academy that I started making video art again.’

Van der Linden is now also leading the viewer around her world. It is a beautiful world, partly reality, partly dream. “People often call me Naive. But it is not that I do not relate to reality. I choose a different way of looking, come to places where someone else does not often come and create my own reality with video.’

She has a darkened spot at the Artolive exhibition. That darkness is necessary to walk in her world and to be an unconscious part of her world. It is no more than a corridor made of two screens. On these screens a wonderful mysterious nature has been projected, with a lot of depth full of moving flowers and slightly enlarged insects. The two screens each have four layers, which pass you by at different speed. The last layer consists of gray facades that dampen the bright colors of nature. Once out of the corridor you experience how you yourself were just part of this installation. One of the walls is transparent and from the outside you see the visitors during their walk in Elise’s nature. This effect gives the artwork walk an extra dimension. “It does something to people,” Elise has already experienced at her graduation exhibition, and I really had to take a man on the hand because he thought it was very confusing.’

Another language she speaks with Inescapable. Objects of plaster on a steel table, are connected by steel wires. They are softly shaped mouths, flowers maybe. Organic shapes, which contrast strongly with the rectangularity and hardness of the tables and the cables. Is it that so-called naivety that is being restricted? Van der Linden does not want to say it immediately: “Maybe I explain too much.”

Exhibition Westergasfabriek Amsterdam from 14 to 17/9.
Info www.expojongtalent2006.artolive.com

Stentor: Elise leidt kijker rond in haar droomwereld (2006) Agnes van Brusseladmin