The newly graduated Norwegian photographer Geir Moseid is having his first solo exhibition at Flowers East Gallery in Eastern London.
The series ‘Plucked' is an investigation into the duality of the home, urban alienation, social segregation and human relationships. This duality of the home extends further, adding layers to the series, incorporating the ethics of both social documentary and staged photography, as well as the possible cognitive dissonant experience of the viewer. This dissonance was built around notions of ambiguity and the uncanny.
The home is often known to be a safe space where one can be private and intimate. The home has a sentiment of security that is built around the fact that we can seclude ourselves, distancing oneself from the interference and surveillance of others. It is with this point that its most problematic duality is made evident. The home is a harbourer of some of humanities gravest crimes. These crimes occur behind closed doors, including physical, sexual and psychological abuse.
The element of time and death is also present in the repetition of flowers throughout the series. Here flowers act as a subtle metaphor concerning the duality of life and death, of which are inseparable through time, not unlike photography itself. The act of plucking/picking flowers is death and once the plucked flower is severed from its life force, it is subject to a slow, often beautiful, process of dying.
The images are talking about the everyday with a calm surface, but that, on closer inspection, raises question about the apparent peaceful depiction, juxtaposing the viewer's emotional response to the photographs with a subtler sinister undercurrent. When this emotion is strong enough to allow the viewer to travel back through their personal history, to where a similar emotion was encountered, the viewer is removed from the physical object, that is the photograph, and the situation it is depicting.
Geir Moseid is a Norwegian photographer, who works both in Oslo and London. He took a BA in Photography at London College of Communication. Since then, Moseid has taken part of exhibitions around Europe. This fall he was part of the annual Norwegian autumn exhibition (‘høstutstillingen’), but Plucked in London is his first separate exhibition.
Geir Moseid
Plucked
19 September - 18 October
Flowers Editions
82 Kingsland Road
London E2 8DP
T: 020 7920 7777