Espen Kluge I’m Not Here

 

Artist, coder, and musician Espen’s oeuvre includes a series of haunting images of eerie objects and spectral like portraits. In this work there seems to be an interplay between those Freudian concepts of displacement and condensation, paired with a poetry of imagery that oscillates between message, symbolism, mystery, fear, and desire.

One comes upon the ghostly image of a man, who seems part imaginary and part real, allowing us to feel recognition, and suddenly repulsion at his strangeness, his artificiality. This strange admixture of elements seems to be characterize much of Espen’s work, allowing the creative artist to have a kind of mysterious possession of his viewers and audience.

 

 

Meditation

 

 

Waves

 

Much of the artist’s work evokes a sense of entrapment, of hidden entanglements and a dark well of despair woven from otherworldly materials made of ether and the tangled underbrush of nightmares, alive, dead and not of this earth. Even in his music, Espen seems to wish for the listener to not just feel the thrill of daring in the soundtrack for Heedless (a documentary film about a Norwegian downhill skier) but as well to feel lost in the score that features acoustic, experimental, and classical elements. Any art that transports you from your own world to another is always something remarkable, and even if its only to the darker recesses of your own mind.

 

SoundCloud 

 

 

Unfreed

This kind of immersive experience is typical of the artist’s practice. Indeed, much of Espen’s work has come from a kind of meditative practice, the viewer has a sense of being lost in these dreamscapes, the intention of the artistic process being a way “to try to find some kind of intuitive state to escape into without much thought. “

 

 

Perception

In Espen’s self-portraits there is an echo of sadness and a combination of naturalism with strangely ghostly veil of digital creation, even the objects such as Shape Shifter and spectral environments engage yet haunt.

The artist notes he was always introverted “which resulted in many hours of immersion and isolation into various hobbies, I loved to pick electronic things apart, and to try and combine them into something new, albeit mostly unsuccessfully. Two things that I have been creatively been pursuing is music, and digital visual art. As a young person, this was clearly an escape of some kind.”

Learn more about the artist via his site here.