contribution to OPEN ART 2019 >>

“Alexandra Hedberg’s pretty façade laugh is infectious in the urban space. It is a stylised laughing face we see, something we recognise from advertisements, from selfies, from photos of movie stars or perfume ads.

A smiling face is both attractive and intrinsically, deeply human. Hedberg’s emblematic smile and laugh for the walls of the urban space therefore begins in the simple hand-drawn portrait. From there, she extrapolates it to the world of ideals, where it becomes a symbol for something more ambiguous or transboundary.

The technique she uses to construct the image, created from sub-slides with applied image pixels, also reinforces our mediation on the Self, simple geometric figures that form a dot matrix we interpret into a picture. This is how traditional media has conveyed our photographed faces for a very long time. What is it we are really seeing?”

Stefan Nilsson
Open Art exhibition catalogue, 2019