Artist's Statement

Dan Skjaeveland

In 2019 I began to actively engage with the images I found in housing ads. From my perspective on the sidewalk - surrounded by bustling commuters and the myriad of sounds that are so familiar to urban habitants - I began to look for what one might call the objective qualities of these pictures. The paper texture, saturation of the inks, light/shadow play and resolution would in different ways affect these images - helping to push them beyond their intended function and into something resembling the work I'd so often come across in exhibitions and photo books.

In working with this project I'm trying to understand more about how an image has the potential to contain multiple meanings - all influenced by the context in which it's presented and the placement of the frame - and the pictures  I've been ending up with seem to me to depict spaces that exist somewhere between truth and fiction.

For this reason the title could be read in two ways. Both as a description of what the pictures depict, and as a question, asking us whether the pictures we are seeing in these ads can be looked at as an accurate representation of real spaces.