Ragna Bley

I am sliding from one mouth to the other, back and forth without breaking. Breathing is heavy.
I am rubbed on to your skin, to even out your skin-tone. I make you darker, I make you lighter. I cover. I highlight. I make up.

(You make up what you’re trying to make up!)

The stone face with too many layers, no, not too many, just enough
to create a sufficient shield. The shield isn’t a mask. The shield is the substance
the shield is what you see, what it is, is what one is.

Thought — we were left alone on the baseball field.
In a cheesy Hollywood youth production, within the system
you would have proposed
It is not gonna happen, and it wouldn’t change anything
You stroke the thread away that loosened from the canvas
as if it was someones hair. Someone’s clear cheek
slow to come into the light. Your favourite part of
her (his) face. That curve. That stroke. That mark.

I read somewhere in an interview with an older
successful woman, she said that using makeup
for her was a way of not having to think about her
appearance. She would put it on in the
morning and that enabled her not to care about
her looks (for the rest of the day)

In the latest film about Noah and the ark,
he wraps a snakeskin around his arm, it looks
dry as snakeskin does when it has left its shiny carrier,
when the skeleton, the snakeskin,
is winded around Russell Crowe’s muscular arm
It starts to glow, Noah can now speak to God.
Noah substitutes the the snake, or the snake was always a part of Noah.

Resting on the Portland-stone, the smooth shiny egg-yolk is left to dry in the air

Ragna Bley (f. 1986 Uppsala, Sverige) er billedkunster og bor og arbeider i Oslo og London. Seneste utstillinger inkluderer: Foajéutstilling, Kunstnernes Hus 2014, What Thinks Me, Taiga Art Space, St Petersburg 2014 We met at the far end of the landscape and both acted shy, Grünerløkka Kunsthall go Podium, Oslo 2014, Read Your Call, Galleri Diane Kruse, Hamburg 2014, WIPHenry Moore Gallery, London 2014, Summer Doldrums, Kunsthall Oslo, 2013, Leather Body – Feather Scope, LNM Oslo, 2013. Bley har en Bachelor fra Kunstakademiet i Oslo og tar for tiden en masterutdannelse ved Royal College of Art i London.