Swedish Surrealism and Beyond

The American Swedish Institute is the perfect destination for a blah Saturday morning: the size is manageable, the café is appealing, and the exhibits are a bit out of the ordinary. The overall tone is one of relaxed Old World sophistication mixed with North Woods charm, and even the ultra-bright fabrics in the gift shop—too cute to actually consider buying—help to lift the mood on a cloudy winter day.

A selection of large landscapes by a self-taught young Swedish Photoshop expert named Erik Johannson are currently on display. The landscapes would be beautiful in themselves, but Johannson has taken them apart and put them together again digitally to create fantastic images in which, for example, a rural highway rips open like a zipper, a lake becomes a broken mirror, or a snowy field is transformed into a stitched white fabric.

The results are entirely realistic and wonderful to look at, albeit only briefly. There is no deeper significance to the images than what we see at a glance. They're a testament to human fancy and hard work. A video on the second floor illustrates the many layers Johannson is required to create to achieve the effects he's looking for. (You can watch that same six-minute video here. It's perhaps more interesting than the image itself.)

I'm a big fan of landscapes, if not exactly a connoisseur. I also spend a fair amount of time using Photoshop, though my technique remains amateurish. I was charmed by the fanciful imagery being put forth by Johannson in such a precise and unfanciful way, less surreal than super-real ... but I would also like to have seen the landscapes themselves—the grasses, the rocks, the surface of the water, the clouds—undisturbed by any bizarre manipulations. Depending on your frame of mind, a patch of moss can be more beautiful and fraught with mystery than the Sistine Chapel.

The images that pleased me most were the ones in which the "event" rather than the landscape dominates the scene, and we don't need to bemoan the vista that's been digitally transgressed. For example, in one image two sheep are being shorn, and we can see that the wool will soon take its place in the sky as clouds and thunder. 

In another image–not included in the show—a workman is unloading moons from his van while a woman in the background is attaching one of them to the horizon.

As it happened, my craving for honest landscapes was assuaged on the third floor of the mansion, where we came upon an exhibit of photos taken with a panorama camera in northern Sweden just after the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl. The prints were small, and they had faded somewhat, but there were forty or fifty of them on display, and many were lovely.

By the time we got back down to the restaurant, the only table for two available was right next to the front door. We decided to skip the Roasted Beet and Gjetost, sunflower seed, shaved apple, and radish sprouts on danish rye, and head home to a refrigerator full of leftovers ... but a much cozier table.