Blue in Green is built around two registers of time. In the first room, the sea: photographs made from a boat on a single February morning, in the cold blue and bone white of winter on the water. In the second room, the forest: photographs made across months and weathers, dense with the greens of moss, birch and fern. One morning, one year. The exhibition holds these two speeds beside each other. The title borrows from Miles Davis: "Blue in Green" was recorded for Kind of Blue in 1959, a slow piece that hangs in two colours and never quite settles.
The blue is one boat trip. Tronvoll and her captain had made the same trip many times before, learning the route, the speeds, the angles, until on this February morning everything aligned: light, swell, weather, and a captain who could hold the boat where she needed it. She held her breath and waited. The camera sits at the height of the water, the rock close enough to read. To be in nature, not in front of it.
The blue reads almost as a single sustained breath. The seven photographs are hung in an even line, but the swell carries across them, and as you move along the wall the water moves with you. Up close the works are photographs of rock and water. Pulled back, they read almost as colour: bone white of the headlands, deep blue of the winter sea, the bands settling the way color does in a Rothko.
The green works differently. It accumulates: a stream in late autumn, birches curving low through the spring, a fallen trunk in a flooded reed bed, mist over the trees, moss thickening on stone. The rhythm is not a single morning but a turning year. Where the sea is one morning, the forest is a year of returns.
Tronvoll works on medium format colour film, in available light. This is her language and has been for thirty years. The prints are made by hand in Berlin, from negative, at full size, and mounted on aluminium in editions of five. The slowness of the process is what allows the colour to arrive, the surfaces to settle, the water to hold its weight.
The works are titled by date. "08.02.24_b", "29.05.24", "21.11.23". The titles record only the day. Each picture stands as a single document of a single moment, and no moment is given priority over another. The approach is documentary; the result is poetic, full of weather and atmosphere. Together the photographs compose something larger.