Amalie Jakobsen’s Minimal Sculptures Warp Our Perception Of Shape, Space, And Dark Matter

‘Fool’s Gold’ (2019) brings the universe and its orbiting metallic bodies into our contemporary worldview. Stone-like sculptures made from aluminum, copper, bronze, and 24-karat gold, exist as abstracted forms of asteroids: some are suspended from the roof, and each represents the ways in which these celestial fragments travel in their fixed orbits around our Solar System. Each sculpture is equipped with a microchip with a GPS tracker, to comment on the exploitation of asteroid mining, a growing technological development occurring at the asteroid belts near Earth. The elements being mined in question contain a wealth of minerals, including gold, platinum, cobalt, zinc, lead, and water that are essential to the planet’s economy—a phenomenon that has been happening naturally for millenia by the Earth’s crust. The theory behind human-generated asteroid mining is that the inexhaustible supply of natural space resources is considered a solution by many to our planet’s own rapidly declining resources. In ‘Fool’s Gold’, the viewer can sense Jakobsen’s issue with exploitation, personified through the vigorous hammering and banging that aggress the surfaces of the sculptures, thereby creating their form.

‘PROOON’ (2016), exists as an exhibition tribute to the Russian Avant-Garde artist El Lissitzky’s ‘Proun Room’ (1923), investigating Minimalist Art through Jakobsen’s own perspective. A collection of varying forms and colors inhabit the room: each piece bending, curving, or sharply angled, their hard-edges appear jarring to the viewer. Bold color plays a large part in the optical experience, which, when combined with the material forms of the works, establishes a visual framework for which notions of repetition, malleability, and asymmetry can flourish—creating a warped and dynamic state around them.