MELK is participating at the art-fair What a Mess in Fredrikstad, Norway, 24 – 26 August 2012 with a solo-project by the Bergen based artist Marthe Elise Stramrud titled Livingroom Poetics.

During the 16th century, a great number of tulips were imported to the Netherlands as a response to a great popularity for the flower. The tulip became a fashion that struck members of all classes, and prices kept rising beyond reasonable limits. The market exploded and a single tulip bulb could be worth more than ten times an annual income. Nevertheless, by the early 17th century, prices fell so rapidly that the Dutch Parliament tried to subsidize the trade, though with an unsuccessful attempt. The first recorded speculative economical bubble was a fact and the understanding of value was forever questioned.

The financial ruin amongst large parts of the population caused by the tulips, and commissions by the trade itself, turned many Dutch painters to the flower, and the tulip still-life was born. Four centuries later, the speculations continue and the tulip flower is replaced with mortgages.

In Livingroom Poetics Marthe Elise Stramrud has photographed ordinary objects in her apartment. Creating new situations amongst things that surround her, the images explore the harmony between objects that exist in our everyday lives. The relations caused by and within them turn our minds towards the gesture of seeing and thinking. Her compositions reveal each of the objects potential as study-object, architecture, landscape or fantasy, while at the same time maintaining a harmonic balance in relation to them. The series is comprised of eight images with various subject matters, all focusing on the co-relation between time, object and spectator.

Marthe Elise Stramrud (1984 Kristiansand, Norway) received her BFA from the Bergen Academy of Arts in 2011. She has exhibited her work in cities like Berlin, Malmö, Gothenburg, Guangzhou, Bergen and Oslo. Stramrud is responsible for the ongoing curatorial project After School Special and a member of Flaggfabrikken, center for photography and contemporary art, in Bergen.