Mountains of the Mind

Around 1983 Marianne Heske created novel impressions of the natural landscape using video’s early technologies to generate a still video image. She further manipulated the still image digitally into oversized prints.

Mountains of the Mind is part of a series of large scale inkjet prints on canvas that Heske calls ‘video paintings’. They follow the established tradition of Norwegian landscape painting that celebrates the grandeur of the natural environment. The rugged power of nature that surrounded Heske as a child remained a vivid part of her memory. She was raised in Tafjord, a small village by one of Norway’s fjords where giant slabs of granite rise from the depths of the turquoise water to shape the rugged mountain ranges typical of Norway’s West coast. Heske transformed the factual information gleaned from the digitally recorded landscape into a pixelated abstraction that resembles the paintings from the heyday of the mid-twentieth century New York school. Her video painting is not concerned with the gestural mark making or paint stains that defines the particularities of high modernist style. The word “mind” points away from the monographic mark toward the cerebral and conceptual enterprise of conceptual art. Heske’s goal for this painting is a momentous, philosophical and intellectual encounter with the image of Norwegian nature. It altered expectation to different uses of media and gave her a pioneering role in Norwegian conceptual art and video art.