“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.”
A Fieldguide to getting Lost (2015), is a meditative essay in which Rebecca Solnit attempts to physically and metaphysically locate the color blue as a reference point in charting the depths of emotion and desire. This text was one of Elise Rasmussen’s starting point, when the artist started reflecting on her own relationship to landscape and colour (Rasmussen grew up near the Rocky Mountains in Canada). Interested in the impossibility to achieve utopia, in Did you know blue had no name? the artist examines several examples of historical narratives. From 18th Century Alp explorer Horace-Bénédict de Saussure’s pioneering new methods of experiment and observation of the blueness of the sky, to Yves Klein’s objectification of the female body into both the end and means of his famously patented cue of blue, culminating with the very last film of Derek Jarman released four months before his death from AIDS-related illness. Does blue have a gender? in her essay-style video the Rasmussen rightly points at the absence of women from the history of the colour blue, and most historical records, commenting on issues of [in]visibility, and how power is established through visual and political canons.
Elise Rasmussen is a research-based artist working with lens-based media. She has exhibited, performed and screened her work internationally including venues such as the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Musuem, the Bronx Museum, Pioneer Works (New York), Night Gallery (Los Angeles), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Belvedere 21 (Vienna). Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE), Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), and the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto. Elise Rasmussen received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a 2016 Fellow in the Art & Law Program. She has been an artist in residence at a number of institutions including the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), the Nirox Foundation (South Africa), La Becque (Switzerland), LMCC (New York), SOMA (Mexico City), and the Banff Centre (Alberta). She has received grants and awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts and the American Austrian Foundation. She was born in Edmonton, Canada, and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY and Los Angeles, CA.
Courtesy of the artist, Made with the support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Banff Centre. Special thanks to the Bibliothèque de Genève, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program and Shandaken Projects. US/CA/CH/FR
Elise Rasmussen, Did you know blue had no name? 2018, (film still), 6:56, 16mm film transferred to HD Video, Color w/ Sound
Elise Rasmussen, Did you know blue had no name? 2018, (film still), 6:56, 16mm film transferred to HD Video, Color w/ Sound
Elise Rasmussen, Did you know blue had no name? 2018, (film still), 6:56, 16mm film transferred to HD Video, Color w/ Sound
Elise Rasmussen, Did you know blue had no name? 2018, (film still), 6:56, 16mm film transferred to HD Video, Color w/ Sound
Elise Rasmussen, Did you know blue had no name? 2018, (film still), 6:56, 16mm film transferred to HD Video, Color w/ Sound