Distract 

Curator: Sandberg’s surreal oil painting, entitled "Distract", immediately strikes me as both dreamlike and unsettling. What is your initial take? Editor: I find the composition quite curious, the diamond shape immediately establishes a playful formalism but it is the relationship between the planes that intrigues me most, for instance, the foreground against the backdrop feels spatially disrupted... Curator: Disruptive indeed! Consider the implications of the central female figure—bound yet defiant, positioned between an insistent child and the disembodied heads of livestock. It evokes complex themes of subjugation, commodification, and the performance of femininity. This seems to me like an intergenerational female experience is put on display in some very strange way. Editor: You read an emotional state through her, I see it too, in her glazed over eyes, and in those tears... For me, the semiotic layering here, the brick wall with its livestock almost as a Greek Chorus in opposition to the xlyophone suggests a structuralist critique of representation itself... Are these perhaps layers upon layers of representation, almost trapping our focus? Curator: That’s an insightful read. Considering Sandberg’s broader artistic concerns, "Distract" can be seen as a pointed commentary on the objectification of women. And these trapped animal heads only deepen that. The child clings almost desperately... And for me that suggests a inherited set of dynamics. Editor: The oil handling has such clarity though. Even though this work borders on horror, it is handled in such detail and beauty it feels suspended... Does the artist perhaps even betray the politics through the skilled artifice of the technique? Curator: I believe Sandberg compels us to examine those uncomfortable truths by refusing to let beauty excuse the darkness. "Distract", in that sense, demands that we actively resist that distraction. Editor: So, instead of becoming enmeshed in a potentially unresolvable philosophical problem, perhaps we simply pause and consider the composition again and allow this powerful work to settle upon our understanding.