2015-2016 Brattvåg highschool

​

Client: Møre og Romsdal Fylkeskommune
Art-consultant: Liv Dysthe Sønderland
Artist: Bent Erik Myrvoll
Art budget: 150 000

​

Bent Erik Myrvoll is one of those artists who has no clear line between his art and private life activity. The Art-ambulance, his main art consept and tool,  is used for performances where he simulates life-saving operations to people and a society which lacks reflection, perspective, and alternative thinking.  He presents art as a medicine that reduces pain and materialistic focus. Using authentic equipment from the health sector, ( thouh paited and restyled) as concrete props and metaphors, he underlines the seriousness, the life and death perspective in his message. The devastating consequences that our materialistic behavior has on life on earth is a main core in all his work.

Using self-made art-ambulance clothes, and the ambulance as transport for all necessary errands, makes his life and activity into an ongoing performance and reminder of his art and what he stands for. He reaches a broad audience of ordinary people. 

 

So why choose his pictures as art for this school? They are big processed, photographies, with layers of paint,  printed on reflective canvas. The ambulance, nature, construction-spaces, car-graveyards and endangered birds are some of his main motives. 

First, the pictures points to his activity as performance artist and activist, which gives them a wider range of meaning. The deliverance underlined this. The artist turning up with his ambulance, with high self-composed soundtrack on the siren-speaker, making a ceremony that will stick to the students memory and be passed on as myths about these artworks. 

Second;  This school has health and nursing, car mechanic, and skills targeting the marine industry as main subject choices. The art-ambulance tangles all these disciplines in an unorthodox and appealingly way. Car and mechanic skills, the whole context of the vehicle, traffic-symbols and warning signs, the ambulance, health, life and death, it connects concrete and direct, at the same time introducing deeper questions and concern about the environment. 

​

Back