The Importance of ‘What If?’

by Erin Honeycutt | Fimmtudagur.12.2016 | artzine in english, Viðtöl

The Importance of ‘What If?’

Kwitcherbellíakin at Reykjavik Art Museum.

The two week installation Kwitcherbellíakin ended the last weekend of October at Reykjavik Art Museum as part of the Occupational Hazard project, a think tank which evolved around the former United States Naval air base, Ásbru. In the project, the former NATO-base plays a role as both a geographical place as well as a rhetorical meeting place where local Iceland meets global affairs. The site has now been reinvented as Ásbru Enterprise Park, a business development center for science, education and innovation. As Ásbrú is a poetic term (from the Snorra Edda) to describe the rainbow bridge leading to the home of the gods, it is a fitting description of the transitive identity of the place as a means to another place. The Occupational Hazard project focuses on the use of speculative fiction to rework past narratives and imagine future scenarios and conditions of being. A place such as this acts as a non-place in which to both rely on as a structure and to formulate the breaking of that structure through imaginative speculation.

In the installation put together by Hannes Lárusson, Tinna Grétarsdottir, and Ásmundur Ásmundsson, we see an amalgamation of Land Art and Glitch Art meeting cultural detritus. Other artists collaborating in the installation were Pia Lindman, Unnar Örn Auðarson Jónsson, Skark and Ato Malinda/The Many Headed Hydra. The digital collages within the installation contained historical events, icons, and innuendos mixed with a wide sweep of Western Art historical iconography. The symbology juxtaposed with historical imagery spoke of the contemporaneity of the situation as the historical events’ power and influence was still as much a part of the current dialogue.

I continually returned to Foucault’s notion of heterotopias when attempting to unpack the layers of meaning involved in the installation and its context within the wider speculative project. Foucault’s heterotopia is one in which the suspension of time and place holds infinite possibilities of past and future. His account of institutions of power produce a contrasting space in which several incompatible spatial elements are juxtaposed in the same plane of possibility, encapsulating discontinuities. Time becomes weightless in the heterotopian conditions. Embracing seemingly everything but art, the installation makes an account of the condition of being spliced between neoliberal ideologies and capitalist junctures. Aesthetic engagement can bring a more sophisticated take on the reality which we are grappling with.

No title, 2016 (Ásmundur Ásmundsson, Hannes Lárusson og Tinna Grétarsdóttir)

In 2011, the artists created the controversial exhibition Koddu which highlighted political and socio-cultural changes taking place in Iceland since the 1990s. Their aim was to thread the relations between iconography and ideology in contemporary Iceland before and after the financial crisis and to address core ideas of national identity. In their analysis of Icelandic cultural politics, they brought into discussion some of the ways in which artists are used in the redefining of Icelandic culture to suit the needs of corporate branding, which can lead to a distortion of reality. In Kwitcherbellíakin, the artists continue to explore these themes in the direction of a model which aggravates the focus on utilitarian outcomes of art.

In conversation with Tinna and Hannes after the closing of the installation, we spoke further about their intentions, inspirations, and the processing of reactions. Hannes spoke about how the installation openly addressed elements that continue to play themselves out in the arts, such as the local/global interaction, which, according to the artist, is a continuation of the agenda that began with Iceland’s independence from Denmark in 1944. World War II not only marks the turning point in the history of Iceland toward modernization; the blast of the atom bomb in 1945 marks the beginning of the Anthropocene. As Tinna pointed out, “the promises of the ‘good life’ of modern progress has turned into times characterized by precarity. It is not just the soil that is exhausted – the social structures and human rights that are supposed to secure human and non-human well-being are increasingly dysfunctional and ignored.”

The installation was a camp in many ways, something which Tinna brings to the wider sociol-political sphere in noting how the term has been used to characterize today’s socio-political developments. The notion of the camp has been described by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben as “the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the Modern” (see Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life). The sociologist Pascal Gielen uses the term to describe the art world and the false sense of freedom that it evokes, as the encampment of the art world is continually defined by the inevitable enclosures of capitalism. Tinna notes how Kwitcherbellíakin was the name of a camp in Reykjavík whose commander planted two palm trees and gave it this name. Other camps had very different names after generals or military history. As stated in the introductory text, it could be seen as the first art installation in Iceland, and the first contribution to the local scene.

Image: Kwitcherbellíakin, Reykjavik Art Museum (Court yard). Ingvar Högni Ragnarsson.

The ‘camp’ composed in the installation consists of a variety of elements each carrying a plethora of messages with which to assimilate into a consensus, but perhaps the heterotopic nature is best put into context here where the aesthetic statement is one of disjunction, certainly not an easily quantified outcome. The scale of the installation is immense for a two week time frame: 81 pieces of cloth painted as a rainbow by asylum seekers at Ásbrú during a separate project (the Broken Rainbow Project) hang on the railing amongst pieces of “trash” (none of which is made locally), 15 enlarged digital collages held up by 20 used Lazyboy recliner chairs resting on 40 tonnes of soil. There was also sound installations, videos, a diesel electricity generator, freezers, a compound microscope for viewing the tardigrade – one of countless organisms living in the soil, and three tonnes of stones from the demolished turf house, Litlabrekka.

Tinna described the reactions to the role of the soil in the exhibition space and how reactions to it were a case in point:
„While entering the exhibition space the audience becomes part of the installation. They need to find their feet to move around in the space ‘wearing’ blue plastic shoe covers – a telling image of our relationship with the soil and non-humans others. The 400 square meter exhibition’s soil-covered floor seemed to irritate many of the museum staff – they saw it as creating mess, infecting other spaces of the museum etc. Children were the most enthusiastic about the soil – curious and relating to it and its inhabitants. Soil is not simply a base of life. It is a world of relationality – a ‘multispecies muddle’ to use the words of Donna Haraway. The urgency of our times has called for reconfiguration of how to live with the planet and its inhabitants. Moreover, understanding the multiple temporalities of soil, its organisms and ecological assemblages might prove valuable to disrupt and resist the Modern progress of the anthropocentric, capitalist timescale.“

No title, 2016 (Ásmundur Ásmundsson, Hannes Lárusson og Tinna Grétarsdóttir)

While all of the digital collages in the installation are untitled and meant to be seen as a continuous iconography, it is possible to look at them individually. This image is meant to mark the beginning of the worldview that began with independence from Denmark in 1944. World War II was taking place at the time, a fact that the artists feel the impact of which is missing from historical narratives. In using speculation about the past the artists have the ability to bring up discussions about the commonly held narrative that has not been very present in public discourse. In the image are references to these global affairs such as the Russian tank and the American pin-up postcards on the table where the document is being signed. The absence of women at the signing is notable, although one of the men wears a woman’s hat from the Icelandic national costume. As the image tries to contextualize the place of Iceland in world affairs at the time, the dire situation is painted with humor. According to Hannes, “Iceland is always in dialogue with colonization, something which is not from Iceland, but the rest of the world. Even in current affairs,” he says, “the idea of maintaining independence while taking part in the global economy is a constant struggle.”

Images: No title, 2016 (Ásmundur Ásmundsson, Hannes Lárusson og Tinna Grétarsdóttir)

The frivolity which has marked the media sensation of the US presidential elections can be seen in these two images representing the dichotomy that has become the figures of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Their respective icons have become synonymous with certain ideologies mashed together to create their monstrously heavy identities. The exhibition was held at the same time as the Icelandic elections with the US elections on the horizon; a precarious temporality, which in hind-site seems worlds away. The condition of time in the camp of the exhibition is effectively multilayered to address this sensation.

Like figures from the collective subconscious, they are composed from an array of sources that the viewer may not take into consideration consciously. The Medusa from Caravaggio is wearing a skirt from Degas that covers the tail from Nina Sæmundsson’s mermaid sculpture. Her outstretched arm is holding the balls of David from Michelangelo. Tinna notes that the male anatomy here is more like a handbag, which poses the question of how we are going to inherit this history: “…what kind of luggage are we going to bring with us into the future?” Thinking about future speculations and what kind of future we have ahead of us, this is why the Medusa is so important in this image. She pops up and has been used in philosophy and cultural discourse throughout history. As the original ‘nasty woman’ she has been brought up in the US elections as an allegory for Hillary Clinton. There are again many narratives to choose from. Tinna notes that these two images “…are not just the state of mind, the state of the world, or the state of art, but the state of the post-human…” The amalgamated figures are barely human, a branded interspecies pair who de-center the human from the Anthropocene.

No title, 2016 (Ásmundur Ásmundsson, Hannes Lárusson og Tinna Grétarsdóttir)

The Anthropocene, the epochal term that is marked by significant human impact on the earth’s systems, plays a large part in the exhibition. Covering a very broad timeline and embracing many system’s processes, it gives us glimpses of the role of speculation and imagination as a powerful tool in coming to realize the tensions inherent in any narrative. This embrace can allow a consideration of a wide spectrum of potential futures. To answer one of Tinna’s questions, “What can artists do in this system?” I think a potential answer is to continue wielding a way of thinking and creating that pushes the boundaries of our imagination where systems of oppression and fear would have us encapsulated by small-mindedness. We can turn judgment into curiosity and use fear to rouse empathy. In continuing to let “What if?” permeate our convictions and narratives, a plethora of possibilities and perspectives is opened. As political dichotomies seem to be approaching radical opposition in many places in the world, the need to break out of this binary thinking seems more important than ever. Speculative tools, as these artists have shown, can lead to different realities, some more dystopian than others, but it is the ability to be adaptable and authentic in our thinking that could make all the difference.

Erin Honeycutt

Featured Image, overview of courtyard: Ingvar Högni Ragnarsson

First floor to the left / 1.h.v.

by Erin Honeycutt | Mánudagur.10.2016 | artzine in english

First floor to the left / 1.h.v.

At Langahlið 19 in east Reykjavík is the home gallery of Guðrún Hrönn Ragnarsdóttir, named after its placement in the building, 1.h.v. (Fyrsta hæð til vinstri), or first floor to the left. The first exhibition was in 2012. Guðrún lives in Finland and in Reykjavík during the summers, where she holds exhibitions in her flat. Before moving to Finland, Gúðrun was involved in The Living Art Museum (Nýlistasafnið) and participated in curatorial projects. 2016 is the fifth summer and the sixth exhibition at the flat. I visited 1.h.v. to have a guided tour and interviewed Guðrún about the space.

The first exhibition in 2012, of works by Sólveig Aðalsteinsdóttir, began as a bookwork project. In fact, the plan was to publish bookworks along with every exhibition. Bookwork by Sólveig from this exhibition consists of layers of six pages of tracing paper; the artist has drawn on the top page so the rest of the pages show softer and softer markings. The drawings represent the space of the apartment, which consists of six rooms. Sólveig created a drawing, a large outline of the architecural layout of the apartment, and an edition of ten sets of six handmade books. From a text accompanying the exhibition: “The subject of both the drawing and the book is the architectural layout of the apartment; explored through line, form, layout and the duplication. In the production of the book ordinary printing techniques are avoided as simple handmade methods are preferred.”

solveig1

Guðrún chooses artists who she thinks can make a dialogue with the space and between the two artists who are invited to exhibit together in the flat. The first exhibition was with Sólveig, but then the project just kept evolving. She prefers the project to stay open-ended. The second exhibition was held in 2012 by Ingólfur Arnarsson, and Ingólfur’s work above the windows in each room has remained in the flat. It is a color palette on the ceiling reflecting the hues of the colors outside the windows. Ceiling Painting in front of a window in four rooms. Household paint on white ceiling. The chosen colors meet the visitor inside the apartment based on colors outside the window.

ingolfur2

ingolfur1

The exhibition held during the summer of 2013 was of work by Carl Boutard and Eggert Pétursson, artists who had never previously worked together. Carl, from Sweden, started with an illuminated vitrine containing objects in pairs. Eggert showed small floral paintings and photos showing the inside of the paintings. Later they decided that everything in the apartment should exist as a pair: two tables, two chairs, two dressers, two flowers, two vases etc. The bookwork was a reworking of Eggert’s book from 1980, „what I had in mind“. The new version was called „what we had in mind“. Eggert explains the bookproject:

Early in the year 1980 I sat at the desk of my studio of the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Holland, with a pile of paper. I closed my eyes and waited for images to appear in my mind. The moment something appeared I quickly sketched an image and soon a substantial pile of drawings had accumulated: pictures of houses, landscape and so on. Faces were excluded. In the following weeks I cycled around Maastricht and the surrounding area with a camera in hand. Whenever I noticed something in the environment that resonated with my drawings I took a picture. This resulted in nine drawings and nine photographs, which were later printed in a small booklet called “what I had in mind.” Two years ago Guðrún Hrönn Ragnarsdóttir showed Carl Boutard the book. When she invited Carl and myself to exhibit at her home gallery, 1 h.v., Carl came up with the idea to repeat this process which I agreed on. Early this year I sat down with a pile of paper in my apartment in Stavanger, Norway, and drew sketches in the same manner as I had done thirty-three years ago. I sent the pile to Carl, who immediately started to search for subject to photograph inspired by my drawings. What I had in mind became what we had communally in mind. Countless participants can now repeat the piece in multiple different ways.

carl

eggert1

Having a gallery in your home could bring many variable outcomes, however, it seems that the conceptual art exhibited here is often unobtrusive and minimal. “The quality of being in a home,” Guðrún says, “is that it automatically ties things into the everyday. I think also when you exhibit in a home you see new possibilities because it’s very different than a gallery space. It changes very much how the visitor approaches the gallery. They start to talk more perhaps. I think the artists definitely take into account that they are exhibiting in a home. I hope the two artists exhibiting can create some kind of dialogue, but it comes about naturally based on who exhibits together.”

The following summer of 2014 Magnus Pálsson exhibited drawings from different times. They were ideas and sketches for works.

Kristinn Guðbrandur Harðarson did an installation around Mount Vörðufell. Excerpt from a text about his contribution:

Kristinn’s works in the exhibition form a type of portrait of Vörðufell in Biskupstungur. Kristinn has had a number of close connections to the mountain and its surroundings for years. The artworks are diverse in style and form. A travel-story in the form of a book narrates the story of climbing the mountain last autumn. A second book is a reflection on the artist’s closeness to the mountain and knowledge about it gathered throughout the years. Simultaneously the book contains biographical fragments, although those are set within a frame limited by time and location.

unnamed

Another work consists of text attached to a doorframe. The text presents fragments from walks on and around the mountain over the past decades. There are also two photo collages, firstly focusing on Úlfsgil gully on the southern slopes of the mountain and secondly focusing on the nearby area of Birnustaðir farm. Finally a mural poses as a kind of title page for all the works in the exhibition. During the past few years Kristinn has created works based on his excursions and research of his local area. The works in this exhibition as well as many of his previous works are inspired by oral history, travel stories and the exploration of Icelandic nature by landscape painters such as Kjarval, Ásgrímur and others of their generation.

The summer of 2015 was more of a private exhibition showing many artists: Guðrún Hrönn Ragnarsdóttir, Ragnar Jónasson, Sólveig Einarsdóttir, and Guðrún’s brother Jónas Ragnarsson. The exhibition included mainly drawings and photos created by Jónas when he was a young man. Jónas’ son Ragnar made an installation of his father’s drawings of boats sailing at sea, which were hung on one wall and on the opposite wall Jónas’ sea landscape slides were projected. The other exhibiting artists, Guðrún Hrönn Ragnarsdóttir and Sólveig Einarsdóttir, also referred to Jónas’ work in their own work.

Now on view at 1 h.v. are works by Inga Þorey Jóhannesdóttir and Ivar Valgerðsson. Inga Þorey presents Fram og til baka, a walk through passports representing the borders between Syria and Iceland. A very organic texture, like tattooed skin, is photographed and set on clouded glass. Each passport has its own aesthetic of pattern and emulsion where the enlarged punchholes create a tunnel linking them together. Each page in every passport has the passports number punched or laser burned. (these holes can be seen on the bottom of each page in every single passport). The ten countries include Syria, Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Finland, and Iceland.

Ivar’s work Between the Paintings: ten pictures from the National Gallery of Iceland is an installation placement of what appears as paint sample cards on the walls. These are photographs taken of the empty white walls in between the paintings in an exhibition held at the National Gallery of Iceland. They display the camera’s diverse interpretation of color nuances, light, and surface in the museum halls based on their placement. Ivar created a bookwork in connection with the installation.

books

Iceland has a history of innovative exhibition spaces. There was Gallery GÚLP! in the mid-90´s which held exhibitions in a shoebox-sized box. There is Gallery Gangur (The Corridor), another small home exhibition space. There is also Gallery Gestur in a small briefcase, which creates the atmosphere of an exhibition opening in whatever space it is opened. There is also a gallery in a rusty shed, The Shed, which migrates around different inconspicuous locations around Reykjavík.

Guðrún has created an innovative space for conceptual and minimal art that is not separate from where she spends her daily life. The production of bookwork from each exhibition adds to the architectural study of the space, as some aspect of the 3-dimensional transforms into 2-dimensions.

Erin Honeycutt

Photography and Geologic Time – an inquiry into the perception of time

by Erin Honeycutt | Fimmtudagur.10.2016 | artzine in english

Photography and Geologic Time – an inquiry into the perception of time

Normally, we think of rocks as dead material, but on a microscopic level they are in constant growth, animated by invisible chemical processes. The formation of lava rocks is namely an active process from the outset that continues to develop throughout their life cycle. The project revolves around how one can expand the perception of time by looking at the internal structures and processes of lava rocks. (Veronika Geiger)

Detail of Hraun (2016)

Geology and photography are seemingly two fields of thought and action running in parallel streams that rarely intersect with the other except when photographs are taken to rely scientific information about geologic structures. However, both have the ability to relay contemplative inquiry into the perception of time through simple data. Both photography and geology hold a return to origins, a seeking out of the bedrock from which we can know what we know. They both relay a simple equation of cause and effect, whether in the darkroom or through larger processes like the shifting of tectonic plates. Veronika Geiger’s approach to these two fields is inspired by Land Art practices and in this way photography becomes an extension of Land Art. With a background in Fine Art photography from Glasgow School of Art and a recent MFA from Iceland Academy of the Arts, Veronika delves into her experiments with the compulsion of a hypothesis being tested. Methodologically she follows her curiosity with the balance of imagination and chemical fact, reality and speculation.

Hraun (2016) No. 6281 and 6285, Gelatin silver print, 100 x 150 cm, Rock type: Gabbro xenoliths from silicic tuff, Place: Kambsfjall, Króksfjördur, Vestfirdir, Iceland, Age: 10 million years old, Petrographic slides borrowed from the Icelandic Institute of Natural History

For five days at the beginning of August 2016, Veronika and I followed a group of geologists with a variety of research focuses in the Askja area and especially in the new lavafield, Holuhraun. Holuhraun lies just north of Vatnajökull in the Highlands. On August 29, 2014, a volcanic eruption began that produced lava spreading over 85 square km by the time the eruption ended on February 27, 2015. The original surface of Holuhraun was an older lava flow from 1797 (Icelandic Meteorological Office.)

Holuhraun lava field

With the expertise of Morten Riishus, a danish senior researcher in volcanology and geology at the Institute of Earth Science, University of Iceland, we got the priviledge to get insights into geological research methods in the field. Three overlapping research projects took place; the first was looking at the geomorphological and geochemical processes of change in relation to how volcanic glass, dust, and sand from Vatnajökull is transported towards the Northeast across the dunes in the desert landscape north of the glacier; another project looked at the microbiology and colonization of barren land at Holuhraun, i.e. the first signs of life on new lava; the third project aimed to create an analog of the Mars Curiousity Rover’s gigapanning scheme, a camera that creates a matrix of images with the ability to be zoomed in up to 800 times. We were grateful to be allowed this chance to follow the geologists’ work in the field, asking them questions and documenting their process.

Geologist Morten Riishuus and microbiologist Anu Hynninen at work

One day we rode with the geologists through a valley that is flooded daily with glacial runoff. These glacial rivulets arrive in tiny trickles from a great distance. With light sensitive paper placed gingerly in the path of the rivulets, Veronika captured an aspect of their movement and aesthetic that a normal photograph couldn’t capture. Her ‘photograph’ of the glacial flood rivulets were from the actual body of the rivulets, their weight and flow appearing on the paper in different shades. The paper has received its color and patterning directly from the water, with immediate impressions of the light and weather-conditions present on the day they were made.

Geologic tool

Another day we trekked with sheets of handmade paper to Viti, a crater filled with warm cloudy blue water situated next to the larger crater lake, Öskjuvatn. The plain of black sand that we crossed before arriving at the crater gave us a good sense of the surrounding landscape and its vastness. Taking the papers one at a time, some more porous and thick than others, they were let into the silty, mud bottom of Viti’s edges where they gathered directly onto the paper an impression of how sediments are transported. In an expansion of the photographic moment, an impression was taken that included movement, weight, and porosity.

Víti Crater

Later that day we followed the geologists to an area where natural springs created a flowing creek among new lava and old lava. Here, algae that had grown in the spring was placed onto the light sensitive paper and set directly in the sun. Again, the weight and body of the algae created an impression on the paper. In places where the algae blocked the sunlight, the paper remained a distinct shade from the parts marked by sunlight. Any chemical variations resulting from reactions between the water, the algae, and the paper will be seen later in the laboratory.

Hiking on a trail marked through the edge of Holohraun, the two year old lava was distinctly loud under our boots, the brittle whisps of once fluid mass strung across larger bodies of lavarock. In some areas, deposits of sulphur, white and yellow, formed along the mouths of cavernous openings. Attempts were made to take impressions on these deposits, as well as on the sun-heated surfaces. Taking samples of these, as well as of the fine lunar-like sand, Veronika hopes to find a chemical means of fixing them to the image.

Later in Reykjavík, we recorded an open conversation between Morten, Veronika, and I, each representing the approaches of geology, photography, and art history/theory. The intention was to learn more about each of our research interests, the craft of each of our fields, and how they overlapped. It offered me the opportunity to reflect on the idea of the geologic time period of the Anthropocene as an aesthetic event. The Anthropocene opens up an epochal way of thinking about time as well as narrative. The narrative involved in threading the events of an epoch shows how we create meaning in the space between the encounter of different temporalities. This is the encounter that is crucial in Geiger’s project. An example of an encounter in geologic time-scales is presented by Morten Riishuus in the following excerpt from the interview:

As you’re driving from Akureyri east, you’re driving through a volcanic succession that is tilted, layered and packaged toward the Southeast…. If you think about it, you’re driving east and the landscape you’re driving through, this tilted strata towards the East, means you’re driving forward in time as all the layers disappear into the earth. (Morten Riishuus)

Lava from Holuhraun eruption

The media theorist, Jussi Parikka writes about the term deep time which was first used by Siefried Zielinski in the discussion of aspects of media. Parikka’s new materialism of media emphasies a different notion of temporality and spatiality by pointing out how media technology is tightly linked with natural materials. Expanding the temporal use of the term deep time, Parikka uses it to combine the geological materials enabling media processes, and the temporality of the earth, which consists of billions of years of build-up and break-down.

In this way, Veronika’s experiments with photography continue the narrative of material processes of the earth out-of-ground, cultivating the temporality of the earth in a new medium that includes the human senses. In her project at Holuhraun she continued her focus on how one can expand the perception of time by looking at the internal structures and processes of lava rocks. By observing the physical layers and traces of time in the rock, the tension between the geological time-scale and biological time-scale becomes concrete.

Erin Honeycutt

Here is a link to a transcription of the interview in its entirety: interview-transcription

Sigurður Guðjónsson at BERG Contemporary

by Erin Honeycutt | Miðvikudagur.09.2016 | artzine in english

Sigurður Guðjónsson at BERG Contemporary

From September 2^nd to October 22^nd Sigurður Guðjónsson will exhibit his first solo exhibition at BERG Contemporary. The former glass factory’s high ceilings and sonorous exhibition space is well suited to the artist’s compositions. In the darkened space, the natural light from outside plays a role in the visitor’s adjustment to the contrasting luminosity. Emerging from daylight, it takes a few minutes for the senses to adjust – an element that brings the visitor into awareness of the body’s sensual attunement to its surroundings. Once this sensory assortment has taken place, the audiovisual presence of three video projections pulls the sensory world of the exhibition into position.

AV Machine’s visual presence arrives from a not-so-distant past as a manufacturer’s conundrum – a compact unit (audiocassette player and television screen combined) of convenience that is not so convenient for the human senses. This ‘dead’ media apparatus flickers with a familiar glow on its miniscule screen, the pale blue light of which is self-generated, correlating to the fuzzy, crackling closeness of its search for a signal. The distant deep bass notes filling other corners of the space amplify the closeness of the unit’s audiovisual presence. Throughout the exhibition combined layers both mechanical and organic are wrapped within the same curious process of moist electronic decay. Layers of differing sounds are combined in their meeting place within the body of the visitor. Each audiovisual element carries itself into the next with the visitor’s body as host.

Installation view

The flickering closeness of AV Machine lies opposite Tape, allowing neither to be experienced in a vacuum. Tape takes the viewer right to the well-worn threshold of the audiocassette tape’s world where one half of the tape mechanically rotates, while the other half lies still and coiled. In magnified closeness, the intimacy is paired with a droning bass that echoes the movement of the plastic ribbons of data as they slough off one layer at a time. The tape exists as much in one’s memory as in reality, as a nostalgic piece of time, recorded yet living. In Tape the materiality of the audiocassette performs without pause for the information it carries. We do not hear the recorded data of the tapes but a simulation of their rotation throughout time- the very circulatory movement of their mechanism rolling throughout time but for what event?

Stepping into the presence of the next component of the exhibition takes one to a new source. The audiovisual composition of Well reaches a similar place of depth in the body where wet pulsations are timed with the sea. The encompassing bass notes in Well with its watery environment takes the viewer into the earth where elements of media originate as rare earth materials. As daylight filters through the opening of the well, its depths locate both endings and beginnings in an oracle-like manner. Both the flickering monitor in AV Machine and the pulsations in the well’s opening carry their own source of light reflection; water becomes signal, rippling through time, appearing on whatever medium is available.

Installation view

Sound and vision are composed in the enclosed space not in competition but in the bodily recognition of new ways of sensual reconnaissance. These sensual layers delve into spaces within the body, some that are tightly coiled like one half of the audiocassette tape, while others move with the rhythm of time. Organic elements of sunlight and water intermix with the mechanical droning of electronic signal flicker and tape rotation, their coexistence made possible in the sculptural world of the audiovisual. The exhibition’s atmosphere of sublime dread and Romantic materialism carries suite with the artist’s oeuvre of surface tension yielding deep undercurrents. Sigurður takes you to the source of sensual information, one magnetic layer of mechanical rotation at a time.

Erin Honeycutt

Interview with Callum Innes

by Erin Honeycutt | Miðvikudagur.06.2016 | artzine in english, Viðtöl

Interview with Callum Innes

The Scottish painter, Callum Innes was born in Edinburgh in 1962, he studied at Gray’s School of Art and the Edinburgh College of Art. Erin Honeycutt sat down with him at i8 gallery the day of the opening to discuss his past and future work.

I was most curious initially about Innes’ views on the placement of his work within the abstract painting tradition and the trajectory of this tradition. He explains that abstraction has always been important to him; Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko made an impression on him as a younger artist, but more important than these figures in the abstract painting tradition is the language used to carry the tradition forward. Innes explains how his continuation of the language of abstraction became a process of removing reference from the work:

“What a Rothko, or a Newman, or a Blinky Palermo does is they give you a moment to pause. I like this idea of seeing something and reading it and having to look at it again and again. It’s that time where you pause and look at something and you read it… that’s what I like to create in my work. I think the earlier works are very important because you’ve got everything at once and it disappears. There’s nothing to take it forward in your head. I like the idea that I can work with an abstraction and try to make something that resonates at different times with different people. I’m getting rid of the figure in the work and I’m getting rid of all the references; I’m using that to be able to move forward. I try to create something by the way that I make work which is partly reduction, a creation of something that has it’s own intrinsic history, it’s own quality… like a fine object.”

Would you say you are experimenting with the time-based quality of a painting?

“Well, it could be time based, but time is not sequential either. So when I started doing abstract works they were on oil paper, like the works out there now, and were tall pieces, 2×1 meters. I discovered an oil paper on which I could paint an image of maybe a stem or a leaf form or something organic and I could dissolve it. So the image is still there but it becomes part of the paper which I think is quite important. For many years I kept that methodology in my head for making work. Actually, it is all about gesture. It is all about physicality when you cross something and something hits you. I still see the paintings as being inherently figurative which sounds a bit crazy to people. It should retain a fragility and that’s partly due to the the way I make work. But you know, what appears to be straight is never straight if made by hand. So the line is always slightly off… with the watercolor I obviously tape things up, but it is never quite straight otherwise. I use tape to get a straight line because I can’t paint that straight, but when I take something off or take a division through something it’s always done by hand so it should have that possibility of failure for it to work.”

And the ‘unpainting’ phrase? You don’t mind it?

“Well, it’s a phrase that I didn’t come up with, but I don’t mind it. Actually, it’s about application. It is ‘unpainting’ because I start with an image in my head although I’m applying all the time. I’m applying paint all the time, as well as turpentine. The big painting in there from 2007 I made along with other paintings for a show in London; seven of them. I decided to make black ones for London which makes them more urban, but these are grey with yellow to make them slightly warmer. That painting looks like it’s been poured down, but it has actually been made from the bottom to the top. I disguise a lot so it looks like one thing but then something simple becomes complex, maybe not so much in that painting. If you look carefully enough in that painting you can see as I stretch I can’t make it quite to the top, so I actually work it to the top so I can bring it back down.”

The painting in question is Monologue TwentyFive. I recalled my own engagement with the painting and how the painting’s verticality arrested the space of the viewer.

“Talking about verticality and space and how you step into space… I remember a show I did years ago at the Pace gallery in New York City. There’s something that happened in 1990-91 where people would try to jump into moving elevator shafts. It was a craze. They would wait for the elevator to come up and jump at the right time. But the idea of expectation, of waiting and not knowing where it is. So if you do that and have this line from top to bottom there’s that slight feeling… I’d like a painting to make that feeling of hesitation; is it a void or a solid? It explained the idea that when you make something, you make it visual, but where does it sit?”

Innes’ simple yet complex engagement with the painting speaks of these kinds of suggestive moments. In reading depths across the canvas, we orient ourselves spatially. Space in his canvas becomes a playing field with unexpected proximities…

“I play with space. I had this exhibition in October with sixty or so works in a big place that terrified me. I was asked if I would consider making wall paintings which I’ve never done before. It was at Dupont in The Netherlands. They’re the same size as the paintings outside, but we wanted them slightly bigger. We made two rectangles on the wall and prepared the wall. We painted directly on the wall but within the rectangle we’ve gessoed it, so it’s a flat surface. And then each rectangle has a very gentle curve on one side to make the whole thing pop. It still looks like a rectangle, but the curve is so slight. So it sits like a portal. You don’t know if the space is behind the wall or outside. So you can do this with color and forms. You can just see the pencil line how it comes off at the corner. It’s enough just to disconcern you. I like making things that disconcern people.”

Innes also launches a new book, Edges, at the opening. Speaking of reading the space of the canvas, I considered the extent to which the whole painting becomes an edge of sorts.

“That’s right. You can have the whole history at the edge. It’s interesting when people see these watercolors… you put two colors together, maybe blue clouds in a rectangle then I put tape around it, then maybe a solid orange, and then with water and brush and the weight of the hand the colors mix. Sometimes you don’t know what is going to happen. But you create and when they really work, these beautiful luminous spaces appear with the unique color held by these edges. I thought of doing photographs for this little book published by Ivory Press, but I decided to just do the edges. We took photographs of all the edges. Then I asked the author Colm Tóibín, who wrote Brooklyn, to write something for it. He is in that tradition of Joyce… not quite, but everyone calls him the next Joyce. He wrote a passage about light and edges.”

Erin Honeycutt

Photos: courtecy of i8

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