Strictly speaking, drawing is a result of lines on a surface, actual signs of a drawing tool. A conceptual expansion of the drawing’s scope of action, most recently also through light and sound, combined with a very precise mental approach and performance, are the characteristics of Ane Mette Hol’s work. She concentrates on the materiality of the drawing tools and the visual and ontological ambivalence of reality. What exactly are we looking at?

Using pencils and pens, Ane Mette Hol recreates paper-based and printed material down to the tiniest, minute detail; notebooks, rolls of paper, sheet music or photocopies. Hol recreates exact copies of various riffraff, such as used masking tape, sandpaper worn thin or a paint-stained sheet of wrapping paper – insignificant residue from artistic production and assembly. The complete craftsmanship and control over the elements used speak of the relationship between unique works and mechanical reproductions, content and void, optical conventions and illusion. The copy is remade into an exclusive original through Hol’s invested time and meticulous work. There is also a special visual sensibility and perception ability in this method. The amount of work alone elegantly reverses the mass of trivial products. Exhibited in a gallery, these illusory works occupy an unclear position between pre-studies, production and result. Nothing here is superfluous to the eye, but Hol’s works remain productively open to possible interpretations – of our experienced reality and everything art history is constructed of.

There is an incessant movement between a material, factual presence and a parenthesis of ideas around the object. This restless movement between nothing and something seems to depend completely upon being in an art-specific room, which is typically white and “neutral”. Empty of disruptions and obstacles, and yet not.

The stiffly organized components of the white cube has (at least) since the 1960s been the subject of criticism and modification. This institution-critical lead does not seem to be Hol’s key mission, but her works still point to a production of meaning internal to the art world that is thinly insulated against the more general and humdrum world around it. She explores the various spaces, the art space and the more universal, by creating works that stand on the threshold between them. The works operate in a context that circulates in and out of them, they are extremely material and concrete, such as a roll of grey wrapping paper standing on the floor, while filling a function as more elusive abstract concepts.

1.
A turn towards more intangible materials has been evident in Ane Mette Hol’s work in recent years. The sound work The Concept of Clouds (That Will Never Exist) is a five-channel work that plays a digitally processed composition. It is based on a gradual multiplication of a single recording of a droplet that falls against a surface. The work is played in a repeated 20-minute sequence, of which the final ten minutes are complete silence. The drip starts in a lingering fashion, isolated, but increases systematically in strength until reaching a cascade of half a million drips hammering as intense noise music against the ears of the listener.

The conclusion is sudden and abrupt, cutting the intense sound picture to zero. The following silence is intensified by all the sound that was there a moment ago.

You can consider The Concept of Clouds (That Will Never Exist) as a down-to-earth and atmospheric story of a rainfall against a tin roof, but the association is haphazard. The physical experience and space-related orientation created by the work is more interesting. The changing placement of the sound in the room and organic rather than static sound quality makes the audience’s senses alert to how physical sound actually takes up space in the room.

It can read as a sort of digital drawing with systematic points of impact, played against the background of the empty, white gallery room. This room actually becomes a blank space– a three-dimensional paper sheet filled with
a suggestive rhythm.

The repetitive rhythm and systematic intervals can easily be associated with John Cage’s composition principles, not least considering the attention afforded to silence, both philosophically and sonically. Cage operated with certain defined standards, but removed tonal and harmonic structures from his compositions, allowing the sound to take front seat. Cage wanted each sound to live up to its full potential and uncover countless complex layers – the music was to imitate nature. In a similar fashion, The Concept of Clouds (That Will Never Exist) is a study in the composite character of sound.

2.
The animated film The Concept of Light (That Will Never Exist) is also oriented analytically around nuances in rhythms and intervals. In a mobile sequence of delicate colours, a flicker arises on the screen, which actually consists of individual drawings with small adjustments, drawings of a sophisticated material and pictorial quality. The animation’s transition to black, and the rapidness of the cuts pose some key questions as to what moving pictures can be. The light as the primary driving force, as a premise for the projection, is highlighted through the minimalist colour planes. The light as a phenomenon and the play of light in a practically pictureless film, is factually transmitted.

In the autumn of 2010, at the gallery LAUTOM Contemporary in Oslo, Ane Mette Hol displayed an animation of an entire 24-hour cycle, based on a large number of drawings. These had in turn been made on the basis of images from a webcam, passively and mechanically updated each minute over 24 hours. Hol created drawings of each update, and these were gathered in the cyclical animation After Day and Night. The changes in the light conditions are gradual, and the framed “shot” of a railway crossing with a bridge captures both people and trains passing by. The film was shown in two projections, each lasting 12 hours, one starting at midnight and one at noon, so that the correct hour in the gallery always corresponded to one of the screens. This reflection of time therefore addressed the viewer’s real-time existence at a specific time in a direct manner, challenging the viewer’s stamina. At the same time, Hol’s own meticulous time investment becomes an initiative to dwell on the uneventful descriptions of the night’s inevitable encroachment on the day, to allow the work of time to seep in. The passing of time and its materialisation in the drawing process are documented as two sides of the same coin, a classical transitory topic – time can’t be frozen – and creates a contrast to the constructive principles of the drawing.

3.
Ane Mette Hol applies several approaches from art history, and the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s is a particularly apt reference for her art. This is especially the case for Hol’s copies of copies, where she lets the hand imitate a simple type of reproduction technology, such as photocopiers and printers, in relation to the analogue and digital image. In a sort of narrative datum point, liberated from any subjective and expressive signature, she can be associated with e.g. Mel Bochner’s strategies. He photocopied 100 drawings at an exhibition in New York in 1966, all reduced to a standard A4 page and presented in notebooks with loose pages. In this way, he rejected the claim that a work of art must be unique – the viewer became a reader who had to construct the experience of the art “missing”. Joseph Kosuth is also known for his use of the photocopier, while he clearly distinguished between art and the documentation of art. The idea of the photocopy was that it could be discarded and made anew. Once people started considering photocopies a replacement for paintings, he stopped making them. Hol’s basis, however, is in the ambivalent transitions between original and copy. The artist herself becomes the reproducing (yet sentient) mechanism.

All art is trash, claims the theoretician Boris Groys, in the sense that there is a mutual dependence between art and waste. Both the work of art and the discarded are defined as useless and non-functional. The main difference is that in the context of a museum, art will be classified and filed, while trash is left to itself and should rather disappear from view. Ane Mette Hol intensifies the attention around the artificial and the marginal, and guides our attention through her minimal and pointed use of drawing tools. The thing you observe, the dead zone between material certainty and experienced complexity, becomes something important, something that should not be missed.