Tori Wrånes: Mussel Tears

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present Mussel Tears, a solo exhibition featuring Oslo-based Norwegian artist Tori Wrånes. The artist has been featured in numerous group shows at the gallery since 2016, however this is her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. 

 
Tori Wrånes is one of Norway’s most celebrated artists. Known for her intricate installations and performances that combine sound, extravagant costuming, prosthetics, and large-scale sculpture, Wrånes’ practice involves fantastical interpretations of themes such as queer identity, Nordic folklore, and environmental change.

As a synesthete—a person with a condition of combining senses such as sight and sound—Wrånes visualizes vocal patterns into a sculptural form. In turn, she also visualizes form in sound, sculpting with her voice and creating spontaneous languages in her performances.

The exhibition title routes the viewer through Kristiansand, Norway, a southern coastal fishing town and the artist’s birthplace. She fondly remembers exploring the waters as a child and expresses profound sadness about environmental degradation and the possible extinction of mussels that proliferated in this area. Known to ecologists as nature’s water filters, these mollusks play a principal role in maintaining a healthy ecosystem.

Wrånes pays homage to these quiet heroes by creating droplet-shaped sculptures that mimic the mussels’ oblong shells, which also signify human tears. She incorporates the mollusks into cement, contrasting the formal qualities of the hard exterior shell with the iridescent interior, further likening them to the human body. Wrånes is interested in what we reveal and conceal, carefully considering the experience of a world outside of our bodies and within our minds.

In a separate room of the gallery, a sculpture of a cat and a dog are united through a shared tail. Each creature is looking back at one another acknowledging that they are forever connected. Through these sculptural forms, Wrånes addresses the dependence and interconnection of all living beings. She charges her forms with a raw and emotional sensitivity that heightens our awareness and understanding of familiar objects and relationships. 

Rumbling periodically throughout the exhibition is the sound of foghorns recorded from the lighthouse on the shores of Wrånes’s hometown. The blaring sounds are strung together by a melodic vocal whirling sung by the artist. Voice, for Wrånes, is a material matter that can be shaped and can shape others. Manifesting the artist’s interest in the culmination of sound, performance, and the body is Wrånes’s performance of Echo Face, an improvised performance. Through prosthetics, make-up, and props, she transforms her physical likeness into a new being and sculpts an operatic melody with her voice. 

The artist is in the permanent collections of the Nasjonalgalleriet (The National Museum of Art, Design and Architecture), Oslo, Norway; Gothenburg Art Museum, Gothenburg, Sweden; Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway; Lillehammer Kunstmuseum, Lillehammer, Norway; Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, Kristiansand, Norway; Preus Museum, Horten, Norway; and the Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway. Her work is also permanently installed at the Ekebergparken Sculpture Park, Oslo, Norway and the REV Ocean Collection, Port of Norway. Wrånes is represented by Shulamit Nazarian and Carl Freedman Gallery.

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