Rønning and Hagen are often referred to as the artists' artists; central to a trend in contemporary art in recent years where the media's own tactility and materiality are highlighted. In many ways, both artists create images that point to themselves as images. Photographs always have an effect of reality as a window onto the world, but Rønning and Hagen, however, set up obstacles in the viewer's way that cause us to stumble at the edge of the image. Through various means, they draw the viewer's gaze towards the photograph's surface in order to almost evoke the photograph as a material presence in the face of the viewer. In an image-hungry contemporary culture, where photography is at the same time everywhere and redundant, the artists take pointed positions. Rønning and Hagen's pictures are in many ways self-explanatory, they are pictures about seeing, and about being in the act of seeing.

Else Marie Hagen's works often appear as visual puzzles where the game between surface and depth, between illusion and reality is set in motion. The images are presented to the viewer like a Chinese box that constantly reveals new layers of surface, until we are left with our own experience in the encounter with the photograph. The exhibition Vocabulary springs from an investigation of photography's flexible relationship to reality, and how, through a visual imagery, it makes itself available for the viewer's interpretation. By addressing concepts such as mood and charge in the image, she illuminates how our consideration is influenced by collective and personal experiences and by the context in which they appear. In the exhibition, Hagen subtly and sophisticatedly observes a set of photographic tools and twists and turns them, for example by staging pairs of opposites such as dark/light and solid/liquid. We see this, among other things, in the photographs "Off, on, off" from 2013, where a light source is turned on and off in an empty room. The different degrees of light and dark create a photograph that is at the same time prosaic and charged, and in which our own role as a viewer is made clear.

Else Marie Hagen (b. 1963) is currently featured in the group exhibition We live on a star at the Henie Onstad Art Museum. In recent years, she has had exhibitions at Kunstnerforbundet, Galleri K, G44 Center for Contemporary Photography in Toronto, the Carnegie Art Award and the Vigeland Museum, and has been purchased by, among others, the National Museum, Bergen Art Museum, Preus Museum and Nordnorsk Art Museum.