Wheels in your mind

Betty Sherdahl (Mistatim) makes paintings and drawings. By exploring the concept of landscape in a nostalgic way, Sherdahl absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation. Sherdahl is a great grandma who enjoys art. Her paintings establish a link between the landscape’s reality and that imagined by its conceiver. These works focus on concrete questions that determine our existence. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, she wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images that leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition and awareness. Her collected, altered and own works are being confronted as aesthetically resilient, thematically interrelated material for memory and projection. The possible seems true and the truth exists, but it has many faces, as Hanna Arendt cites from Franz Kafka. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, Sherdahl investigates the dynamics of landscape, including the manipulation of its effects and the limits of horizon based on our assumptions of what landscape means to us. Rather than presenting a factual reality, an illusion is fabricated to conjure the realms of our imagination. Her works appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. A parapalegic survivor of the ravages of polio. Betty Sherdahl currently lives and works in Saskatoon.