Exhibition text for Fixed Points

It was a lifetime and a country ago (2011 in Iceland, to be exact) that I had the pleasure of meeting artist Gústav Geir Bollason and writing a catalogue essay for his solo exhibition at the Akureyri Art Museum. And this spring, it was an honour to hear from Gústav Geir with an invitation to write for him again. In addition to his own practice as an artist, he also runs Verksmiðjan, an arts space in a former herring factory in Hjalteyri, remote but thriving. Gústav Geir had me in mind for the group videoworks exhibition Fixed Points, curated by Bjarni Þór Pétursson, with its partial focus on human-environment relations.

When I watched the videos by Bjarni Þór as well as Helene Garberg, Kah Bee Chow, and Þorbjörg Jónsdóttir, I could see that they fit together nicely, but putting into words why they did proved pleasurably challenging. I found myself needing to conjure up the hidden storyteller within me. Thus the result, "The four artists and the veil", is an exhibition text written in the form of a fairy tale. This lyrical account of the artists' different explorations with the far-away familiar in natural and built environments describes their collective world "in which matter is secondary to myth, where transformation and rematerialization happen regularly as a matter of course."