Svava Tergesen
Country Farmhouse Arrangement
About the Artwork
Inspired by baroque and Rococo design sensibilities, Garnished Sundries is a series of still-life images that explore the symbolic potential of everyday objects. Made by cooking, splicing, and assembling food and archival materials into perishable collages and sculptures, the work considers how photography has been used to disseminate standards of taste, gender, class, and health. By bringing together different materials and processes into unlikely unions, the work sparks sensations of disorientation and dis-ease, emphasising how the camera can unsettle normative notions as easily as it can construct them. Tergesen’s process begins with sourcing materials at markets before collaging them in-studio, so that it resembles domestic labour such as cooking or running errands. Photography then acts as the final piece in preserving these fragile and temporary arrangements, allowing these objects to persist and hold together.
Country Farmhouse Arrangement
2022
Archival pigment print
Edition of 5
Image size: 14” x 21”
Estimate: $3,500
Courtesy the artist and Macaulay + Co. Fine Art, Vancouver
About Svava Tergesen
Svava Tergesen (b. 1993, Vancouver, BC) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working on unceded Musqueam territory (Vancouver, BC). Tergesen is interested in how everyday objects produce meaning, and how photography can be used to stage a novel encounter with the familiar. Combining photography with elements of sculpture and collage, Tergesen’s work reimagines everyday experiences of domesticity, gender and health. Her work is featured in a solo exhibition at Macaulay & Co. Fine Art, opening Fall 2023, and was recently the subject of Capture Photography Festival’s feature exhibition Ornamental Cookery, Audain Art Museum, Whistler (2023). Her work has been exhibited in group shows nationally, and she has been awarded residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Banff, AB) and Duplex Artist Society (Vancouver, BC). Her work has been nominated for the New Generation Photography Award (2021) and the Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize (2020).
