Onion Skin

Excerpt of exhibition text:

For animators like Anna Sofie Mathiasen, onionskinning denotes the technique allowing  her to see several frames at once. The artist looks at both the previous- and future frames, layered like an onion, as it were. She nestles the in-between image in the sequence to  create an illusion of smooth progression – where the working process in actuality is a  time-consuming endeavour of stopping, discerning, editing and learning.  

Anna Sofie has been making stop-motion animations since her childhood. Perhaps no  wonder then, that her works at Destiny's harkens back to formative years. In four out of  five large collages, two human figures whose age is difficult to determine have escaped  the frames of her animated video Onion Skin, and are now moving about in the outskirts of a city. There they admire and gather alliums, some still spherical, some gone to seed,  shooting flowers from their midst. The metaphor for growth in this case is no metaphor at  all. The collaging of drawing and photography reminds me of Gunilla Bergströms  wonderful book series about Alfons Åberg, educating children and adults since 1972,  chipping away at prejudice and reminding us of the transformative potential of imagination. For Anna Sofie, Cirkeline by Hanne og Jannik Hastrup and Historiebogen by Li Vilstrup  and Jannik Hastrup, may be a more fitting references. Both Bergström, Vilstrup and the  Hastrups demonstrably considered educating the young to be a serious game.  

The sets for Onion Skin's sibling protagonists are alluring, somewhat ominous sci-fi scenes – photographs of a large scale model the artist's mother made ten years prior to Anna  Sofie's birth. The model depicts a future city, influenced by popular films and imagery of  the era when it was made. Rather than feeding into fantasies of urban decay and  dystopian horizons that may spring to mind when confronted with potential futures, Anna  Sofie tells a story of tending to the commons, of taking care of what we share, past and  present, adding to it and observing as it changes and grow.

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