Ake Arnerdal has always loved to create. It’s a bug that caught him early in life, while growing up in Sweden and followed him throughout his career, eventually pushing him into fine art. “I started doing art late, in my mid-20s,” says Arnerdal. “I was on my way to being a special needs teacher and I’d always liked painting and building things with my hands, but never thought I should pursue it as a profession. The teacher at the school asked if I’d ever thought about doing art because we had art in that class. She pushed me to apply to a foundation class and I did and it started from there.” After receiving his Masters of Fine Art from Umea University in Sweden, Arnerdal embarked on a career, launching exhibitions across Europe, Asia and the United States while simultaneously teaching at different institutions in England, Sweden and the US as well. This November, Arnerdal launched his latest exhibition Ta Daa and the Journey Goes On  at the SPAACES Art Gallery. “The show reflects what I like to see in an exhibition.

When I go to an exhibition, I want to be taken somewhere I haven’t been before or to a place where I could recognize some piece of myself in,” says Arnerdal. “Not necessarily a place in the actual world, but to an emotional place that I haven’t been before or didn’t know that I could do. I’d like the viewer to get that feeling, to be taken on a journey.”

Ta Daa and the Journey Goes On is representative of the middle-aged artist’s style: eclectic, colorful and unpredictable. The exhibition will primarily feature a collection of mixed-media collage paintings that employ fabric, paint, text and even paper mache to explore themes of uncertainty and restlessness in a world where everyone seems to be more divided than ever. The actual fragmentation of the pieces symbolizes the challenges that we all face in the discernment of truth and what is right in the march forward through time. “In general, my art is a very subjective way to comment on the world around me. It’s difficult to find your ways and where we’re going and what you can believe in. My art plays with those questions,” says Arnerdal.

While the immediacy of children’s art, harkening back to Arnerdal’s days as a special education teacher, is a theme that is present throughout his artistic cannon, the shapes and colors of the Japanese kimono were a particular influence on Ta Daa and the Journey Goes On . “I’ve realized that I’ve always been interested in colors and shapes from different cultures and that the aesthetic of Japanese culture has always attracted me. Then I came across kimonos and thought, ‘Hmm, maybe I should try to do something inspired by their shapes.’ Like the immediate expression of them,” says Arnerdal. “I thought that I should take the classical shapes of the kimonos and turn them into something different. At first glance, some of the pieces in the exhibition look like kimonos.”

The exhibition will center around nine large mixed-media collages hanging from the ceiling, each about six by six feet, composed of fabric, paint, mixed-text and photography. Adorning the walls and the floor of the gallery space will be sculptures made of paper mache, complimenting the themes explored in the collages. It can be difficult to describe Arnerdal’s art in a concrete way, because, well, even he is not sure exactly where it comes from. His process is idea-based, at least at first, before his creative subconscious begins to take over. “I’d say that it typically starts with an idea. I pick up a pattern or something that attracts my eye. Then it becomes very much process based, I start doing it and one thing leads to another, other times you get stuck and I just want to kick it in the corner or rip it apart,” says Arnerdal. “If it works, it usually starts with an idea.”