Tommy Olsson

Veronica Rebecca

Veronica Rebecca m/ Prins Preben

Dark waters, the murky subconscious that inevitably must become clear, so there are no two's but only one. To focus and calm down: meditate, counting the dried fruit of the Hindu necklace Rudraksha, and there are 108 of them, one for each God and Goddess in the Hindu pantheon. Each God is connected to one state of mind, thus it is also interpreted as 108 states of the human mind. and consciousness. This morning, dark waters rising and sinking, I stopped on the Rudraksh of the God of destruction, Kali. This God is firstly the destroyer of all evil, and the last one seen at the end of times. The God that St. John might have seen in his vision of the Apocalypse. Once the mind is fixed unto one thing, the dark waters clear up, and the mind is cleared, darkness washes away, away, away.

Dennis Lehane depicts in his crime novel Mystic River the story of three young boys in Boston. One of them is abducted by child molesters. We meet them again 25 years later, and the same one is accused of raping and killing the daughter of one of the others. Dark waters rising. The wrongly accused is killed and thrown into the river by his childhood mates. The river tells the truth. It also hides, is murky and distorts. The phone rings, the artist tells me to meet him the next day, and says that the whole thing is pretty CSI. Night creeps upon me, I stumble upon a Hollywood horror film entitled "The Horsemen of the Apocalypse" about a Chinese American woman who is a serial killer, and through the symbolism of the Apocalypse she ritually slaughters four people with three others, trying by murder to impersonate the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. In the film, the Asian woman enters an elevator to kill her victim, but the video footage of the elevator is tampered with so the police are lost. The murderer is someone you would never imagine it to be. I fall asleep. When I meet the artist the following day, he tells me about the murder of Chinese Canadian Elisa Lam, killed in LA at the Cecil Hotel in 2013. In some paranormal way, her naked body was found in a water tank on the top of the hotel. On a rooftop only maintenance workers have access to, and in a tank that is impossible to close from the inside. Strangely enough the artist tells me the fact that Lam was behaving weird going into the elevator, as I saw on the footage later on, and read that her killing is unusually similar to the film Dark Waters from 2005. Either way, the murderer is not there. Not to be found. Only the victims are present. The image of a naked dead body, floating in an empty, dark space. We see Elisa Lam in Tommy Olsson's painting, almost hiding from the viewer in the shadow, smiling unknowingly, or is it knowledge that makes her smile. Dark knowledge of the waters. The world around Elisa is bent, alive, breathing, she is in a different state of mind than us. In one of Veronica Rebecca’s works, we see Charles Manson in an angelic state, with beautiful colors surrounding him. Come to think of it, Manson actually cultivated a cult of LSD infested hippies and told them that the albums of The Beatles where connected to the Apocalypse and killed people ritually connected to his own interpretation of Beatles and the Bible. This mass murderer, was of course not there himself at the killing of Sharon Tate in 1969. Again, the murderer is not there, only the victim. Continue to another work, the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine of the Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. All the headlines are wiped out except for the words: "the bomber", presented together with sentences of adoration from girls in love with the cute bomber. He was the brother and co conspirator to the real bomber, who was is no longer here, he is dead.

Our minds can stretch to infinity, in morals and standards. Those who attempt to live in the borders of sanity, in this case murderers, are stretching their minds into the worst chambers it has, namely killing and psychosis. Yet they attempt to endeavor something we others do not, to live as evil and on the borders of sanity. It is complex, because we are darkly, strangely fascinated with the gruesome, horrible, obsession and sacrifice it demands to take someone´s life. The mind has gone as brutally far as it can. Now cut, focus out and shift angle, focus in and we see the last photography ever taken by Regina Kay Walters. Her mouth is sore, and she is dressed up in different clothes than her own, her hands protecting herself from the photographer, the murderer Robert Ben Rhoades, who is not there on the picture himself. Only the victim. He called Regina`s father later, telling him that he made changes to his daughter, he had cut her hair. So many coincidences are piling up that I ask the artist if he is practicing Black Magic, but he assures me that he, like everyone else, simply just works. Karen Nikgol