Skowhegan Art, 2008

Skowhegan is an intensive nine-week summer residency program for emerging visual artists established in 1946.

In the summer of 2008 Norling created the first iteration of WHITE WASH. Using found windowpanes from New York City and Maine Norling the “wall” becomes a performance as Norling starts to whitewash the windows, erasing the images. This process relates to the removal of images and iconography from the collective mind of society, yet the images are still present, physically on the windows and mentally in our minds. The final step involves Norling reintroducing the images by removing the paint, allowing them to reappear as if seeing them for the first time. The process of painting and then cleaning the paint is connected to the viewer’s perception of the piece, and speaks about the notion of process of creating and how it relates to the outcome of the artwork.