The Factory art exhibition will be held in the old fish factory in Djúpavík from June 1 to August 31, 2019. The focal point of the group show is to explore the artists’ personal relation to, and perception of, Iceland.
As a multidisciplinary exhibit, The Factory showcases a multitude of visual arts, including but not limited to: textiles, sculptures, paintings, photography, video, sound and art installations. This fosters a diverse and dynamic show, welcoming a broad audience.
Contrasts will merge and unify inside of the old factory. Thus, works will reference the spatial and environmental perception of Djúpavík and of Iceland as a whole.
The Factory 2019 will be the 4th iteration of this annual exhibition.
Open daily 9-18.30. Free of charge.
This year, we introduce a new exhibition space in the other end of the Westfjords. The Tub / Balinn is an old house in the village of Þingeyri, and will host an art installation throughout the Summer. The exhibition will give a new purpose to the abandoned house at Brekkugata 8, 470 Þingeyri.
Our overall idea is to establish a connection between two small places in the western region of Iceland and promote them mutually.
Open daily from June 1 to August 31, 2019. Free of charge.
Facebook: www.facebook.com/thefactorydjupavik/
Instagram: instagram.com/djupavikart/
Webpage: djupavik.is
Opið daglega frá 10 til 18.00
Aðgangur ókeypis
Facebook: /thefactorydjupavik
Instagram: #djupavikart
Webpage: djupavik.is
Anna Jóelsdóttir was born and raised in Iceland. She studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago where she lived and worked for 23 years until she relocated to Reykjavík in 2015, where she works now. Jóelsdóttir has taken her paintings into many directions, leaving the frame and bringing her narratives into space with site-specific installations. She has exhibited her work in multiple locations in the U.S., Iceland and Europe.
Anna Jóelsdóttir – (1947) – Iceland
Chopin Was Not Here
Working with large sheets of drafting film hand-painted with acrylic and ink, Jóelsdóttir transforms a particular space into a site where ideas, experience and culture move through the space and create a dialogue. At first delicate and ethereal, Jóelsdóttir’s sculptural canvases reveal a world in which connections and fissures occur with the paradoxical logic of the viewer’s intuition. The old factory space, touched only by time, becomes a frame in which past and present, aging and permanence, hard and soft, firm and flexible, light and darkness make new meaning.
instagram.com/ajdottir
facebook.com/anna.joelsdottir
Invited by the art manager.
Arngrimur Sigurdsson currently lives and works in Reykjavik, Iceland. He finds inspiration in science, science fiction, and all the hypothetical realities humans may create for themselves in the future. Previously, he was more interested in the past, and referenced mythology, folklore and cryptozoology in his work. For a time, he was absorbed with Icelandic Teratology and published two books on the subject.
He works in different mediums but has mostly focused on oil painting and mixed media sculpture. Recently, he has worked with stone carving, which he hopes to develop more in the future.
Arngrimur earned his BA in 2014 from the Iceland Academy of the Arts and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2018. He has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards and has exhibited his work in Europe, Iceland and the United States.
Arngrímur Sigurðsson – (1988) – Iceland
Mermania
Arngrímur’s sculptures are based on ideas of merman morphology, in particular of the female kind. The Westfjords have stories dating back hundreds of years of merfolk, and Arngrímur uses local driftwood, stones and found materials to interpret his idea of the female siren. This is one of the oldest archetypes: the seducing nymph or mermaid who captures the hearts of sailors and passers-by and lures them into the depths of the ocean to either die or confront themselves.
Mermania will be a process based project which the artist will add to, amend and change during the entire exhibit period. He will place and arrange the sculptures in the surroundings of Djúpavík. The intention is to capture and reflect the effects of the local terrain — the feeling of solitude and remoteness — and draw from the cultural heritage of the Westfjords and its specific mythology.
Web: www.arngrimur.com
Invited by the art manager.
Brian Cheung is a visual artist, illustrator, graphic designer and sometimes photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. Brian’s practice encompasses illustration, drawing, painting, lettering, graphic design and photography, most often relying on simple analogue mediums with an emphasis towards process and technique. Themes of place, space and surroundings are repeatedly explored, fuelled by curiosity, itchy feet and a fear of complacency. In 2015, Brian embarked on a five-month winter residency at the Nes Artist Residency in nearby Skagaströnd. This experience had a profound effect on Brian’s work and he has since continued on with a steady stream of residencies in cold, isolated places of
the world as a means of inspiration and motivation.
Brian Cheung – (1990) – Australia
Leviathan
A monstrous sea creature made up of Icelandic flora, fauna and produce represents an imagined personification of wild, natural forces busy at work: relentlessly pounding, carving and sculpting away at Iceland — a force that both gives and takes. Originally drawn during the Nes Artist Residency, Skagaströnd, 2015.
Web: www.briancheung.net
instagram.com/brian9267
facebook.com/bcillustrationdesign
Claire Paugam is a multidisciplinary French artist based in Reykjavík, Iceland.
After graduating from the MFA program of the Iceland Academy of the Art, she exhibited at the 5th Biennale for Young Art, representing both France and Iceland.
Claire regularly exhibits her artworks in various institutions in Iceland and abroad. In 2018, the artist presented three artworks at Gerdarsafn Art museum for the exhibition Likamleiki curated by Brynja Sveinsdottir, as part of the Iceland Photography Festival.
In 2019, she became a member of the board of Nýlistasafnið / The Living Art Museum, Reykjavík.
Her artistic practice is based on visual analogies between the organic and the mineral, leading to researches on shapelessness and what triggers the form.
Claire Paugam – (1991) – France
Web: www.clairepaugam.com
instagram.com/claire.paugam/
Raphaël Alexandre is a new media French artist based in Reykjavik, Iceland.
With a background in computer science engineering, Raphaël created video games and music tools for years. Then, he began to explore the possibilities beyond software by combining it with electronic elements and from there dedicated his researches to art projects.
After taking part in two art residencies in Iceland (Reitir and Saga), Raphaël collaborated with 10 other artists on resurrecting an old merry-go-round, supported by the city of Paris, now on tour in Europe. Raphaël also created a special piece for Vetrar Hátið called Lumikura, an automated light painting photo booth. Amongst others, Raphaël took a picture of Páll Óskar for his single Ég elska þig til baka.
Raphaël Alexandre – (1984) – France
instagram.com/graphool/
facebook.com/raphael.alexandre.art/
Raphaël and Claire had their first collaborative work exhibited at the Wind and Weather Window Gallery in 2019, an interactive diorama of animated lights and slimy sculptures. The artist duo also regularly creates stage designs for concerts.
Never ascending, Always shifting, Almost ending
Never ascending, Always shifting, Almost ending is an installation created especially for the Fish Oil Tank of the Factory. The undefined object suspended between the columns of this abandoned territory seems to come from elsewhere. Few centimetres above the surface of the water lying in the tank, the unknown structure hovers over the water, standing still in a decaying space only affected by the harsh weather of the West fjords.
The sound, constantly reverberating, is taking over the tank, adding a soothing heaviness to the atmosphere. The presence of the object seems to have a logic of its own, unreachable to us.
Never ascending, Always shifting, Almost ending offers a possibility for the viewers to enter a fiction of their own in an out-of-time environment.
Invited by the art manager.
Claudia Hausfeld’s art deals with photography and its connection to reality, following photography’s claim to authenticity through various bends and tricks towards abstraction. She tests this medium’s capacity to convey meaning beyond simple representation. Her most recent work takes her back to the darkroom, to the beginning of photography. The analogue process is deeply rooted in science at the same time that it is escorted by alchemy and magic. The direct relation between surfaces, light, time and chemicals opens many ways to play with the reliability of the photographic image and to lift it into the realm of abstraction.
Claudia Hausfeld – (1980) – Iceland
The Tub / Balinn in Þingeyri
This year, The Factory art exhibition will expand beyond Djúpavík, reaching all the way to the other end of the Westfjords — to the village of Þingeyri. The new established exhibit space is the ground floor in an old abandoned house left unfinished and untouched for two decades.
Claudia’s exhibition can be found here, at Brekkugata 8, only a stone’s throw away from the harbour and the popular coffeehouse Simbahöllin.
The factory in Djúpavík and the old house in Þingeyri have several things in common: they’re old, authentic, abandoned, and embody the forgotten times of the people who once had their daily lives and routines there.
Our overall idea is to establish a connection between two small places in the western region of Iceland and to utilise this old house, which deserves a new purpose. It will serve not only the artist but also the locals and travelers in the area.
The exhibition door is always open, and entrance is free.
Casa Obscura
This site specific work is composed of cyanotype prints of all the windows on the ground floor. The sunlight coming through the windows is directly interacting with the coated fabric, creating a print of Prussian or Berlin blue color. The windows act as a lens and the photographed thing at the same time, whilst the house functions as a camera obscura.
The prints are installed in the space on available materials like hooks and nails that were left behind. The work creates a direct dialogue with its surroundings through manifesting light and making time visible.
Invited by the art manager.
Claudio is a Mexican artist who mainly works with film as a means of analyzing time and form. He is interested in landscape and nature — the importance of and relationship between humans and our surroundings.
Claudio Sodi – (1986) – Mexico
Corazon / Heart / Hjarta
These three sculptures examine the relationship between landscape and its limits. They all reference the horizon, while the small space between the rocks resembles the energy and force that nature has over us.
Jana Rinchenbachova lives and works in Brno, Czech Republic, and Vienna, Austria, as an artist and hiking guide. She studied sculpture in Brno and in June 2017 finished her studies in the Studio of TransArts in Vienna by presenting the project Quaking Perception. Jana’s artworks include interactive real-time installations that examine the relationship between nature and artificiality. The presence of the viewers and the uniqueness of every moment are very important to her.
Jana Rinchenbachova – (1988) – Czech Republic
Waving Memories
This piece invites visitors to peek inside the soul of driftwood that travelled thousands of kilometres across the north pole and landed on the beach of Iceland. Rinchenbachova returns the log to its vertical position, as when it was a tree growing in the forests of Siberia. This time, the vertical experience is different: it carries the long memory of the ice and the ocean. The artist depicts the tree’s heart via bioluminescent ocean algae, creating a glowing three-dimensional wave that mimics the tides and recalls the unrepeatable present moment.
Web: www.rinchenbachova.com
instagram.com/jana.rinchenbachova
For many years, the German visual artist Heide Schimke has used various media to explore the structures, layers and vibrations of nature. In remote landscapes (with a long-running focus on Australia) she seeks landscapes of experience in which she feels very close to existence and is particularly inspired by erosion. This leads her to see surfaces as part of human history in which all memories are contained. “The paths that lead us somewhere—traces and lines that we find or leave in places—become a part of ourselves, whether we like it or not,” Schimke says. In 2012, she was invited for the first time to an artists’ symposium in Iceland. Further visits followed. The medium of transparent foil gives her work a special tension. The earthiness of erosion remains but competes with the transparency of the medium, which always implies a transcendent dimension.
Heide Schimke – (1961) – Germany
A Part Of Ourselves
The geothermal energy that pulsates beneath the Earth’s surface and the power of the water determine the turbulent relationship between the elements of the Icelandic landmass. A Part Of Ourselves (mixed technique on foil) trace the elements in their different mixing ratios: liquid, gaseous, cloudy, misty, diffuse and soft, out of focus and blurry, cloudy or clear or fiery-glowing, flexible and amorphous. Water is not only used as a material in correspondence with colour, but rather it is something that is inherent in nature and forms and gives shape independently. It has been instrumental to far-reaching aspects of human development such as history, culture, and ecology, as well as for body and soul.
Web: www.heide-schimke.info
facebook.com/heide.schimke
For many years, the German visual artist Heide Schimke has used various media to explore the structures, layers and vibrations of nature. In remote landscapes (with a long-running focus on Australia) she seeks landscapes of experience in which she feels very close to existence and is particularly inspired by erosion. This leads her to see surfaces as part of human history in which all memories are contained. “The paths that lead us somewhere—traces and lines that we find or leave in places—become a part of ourselves, whether we like it or not,” Schimke says. In 2012, she was invited for the first time to an artists’ symposium in Iceland. Further visits followed. The medium of transparent foil gives her work a special tension. The earthiness of erosion remains but competes with the transparency of the medium, which always implies a transcendent dimension.
Heide Schimke – (1961) – Germany
A Part Of Ourselves
The geothermal energy that pulsates beneath the Earth’s surface and the power of the water determine the turbulent relationship between the elements of the Icelandic landmass. A Part Of Ourselves (mixed technique on foil) trace the elements in their different mixing ratios: liquid, gaseous, cloudy, misty, diffuse and soft, out of focus and blurry, cloudy or clear or fiery-glowing, flexible and amorphous. Water is not only used as a material in correspondence with colour, but rather it is something that is inherent in nature and forms and gives shape independently. It has been instrumental to far-reaching aspects of human development such as history, culture, and ecology, as well as for body and soul.
Web: www.heide-schimke.info
facebook.com/heide.schimke
Katharina Lob is a German artist and graphic designer. Her passion for the Icelandic horse sent her to Iceland, where she immediately fell in love with the island and its people, nature and culture. While hiking through the rain on a photo tour in South Iceland, it was difficult get the camera’s objective lens focused due to the raindrops on the lens. This was the moment the idea for her artwork emerged: to picture Iceland as if seen through a wet or icy window. Experiments with acrylic glass, foils, glue, inks, salt, varnish and natural materials like feathers, stones, wool and horse hair capture this impression. Salt in humid liquids transforms into crystals, like frost. Always inspired by nature, Katharina also works on metal plates and experiments with rust. As a designer, she is works for some Icelandic clients and designs t-shirts for passionate Icelandic horse lovers.
Katharina Lob – (1968) – Germany
Ice: frozen poetry I+II, frozen sea
Ísinn. Frozen poetry I+II are inspired by the poems of Matthías Johannessen, an Icelandic journalist and poet, that are about the changing of nature in autumn: Mountains turn grey, the heathland falls silent, the whispers of waves and stones turn into icy silence… The ice sails into my heart… not a teardrop remaining on its icy surface. Ísinn . Frozen sea refers to Djúpavík. A swarm of herrings are swimming underneath the frozen surface of the sea. With several treated acrylic glass panes, one behind the next, the work contains different perspectives: some parts become blurred, others come into focus. The position of light is another
important parameter: frontal light changes the look of the artwork, and a positive-negative impression emerges.
Web: www.katharina-lob-art.de
facebook.com/katharina.lob
Katie Ione Craney lives in a small town along a deep fjord in Southeast Alaska. She works to decipher northern ecosystems—how stories of place and land use are adapting to rapid human-caused change. She uses found materials including scrap building materials, plastic food packaging, blueberry-dyed gauze, and her own photographs layered with encaustic on hand-cut, two-dimensional scrap metal. Katie was an artist in residence at Nes in Skagaströnd, in 2017.
Katie Ione Craney – (1984) – United States
Landfall
Living in a remote location in Alaska, Katie is very interested in food security, including the cultural significance and historical use of local foods, paralleled with how remote locations are dependent on fossil fuels for food transport. Alaska and Iceland are dependent upon shipping and imported food, and are both subject to drastic circumstances should those shipping lines become compromised. Landfall uses materials and images that challenge what we are dependent on, including scrap metal, plastic mesh produce packaging, and fiberglass drywall seam tape juxtaposed with Arctic cotton seeds, blueberry-dyed gauze, and imagery of the fishing industry and interpretations of the landscape.
Web: www.katieionecraney.com
instagram.com/decipheringchange
facebook.com/katieionecraneyart
Based in Iceland, New Zealander Kerryn McMurdo creates, collaborates and mentors within the fields of dance, performance art, film + video, installation, theatre, writing and education. Kerryn is a trained contemporary dancer and choreographer and has worked extensively for 20 years, performing her own
choreography as well as working with NZ companies, independent artists and creative institutions. Kerryn has been accepted to international performance workshops + research projects with leading European artists, and since 2015 is the Nes Artist Residency (Iceland) co-director. Kerryn is interested in the kinaesthetic tensions within concepts, embracing the body as the primary site for communication of complex vocabularies, forms and presences. Her work explores and plays with notions of subversion, transgression, liminality, body politics, cultural identity, hybridity, meaning, theatrical abstraction and projection, empathy, criticality and environmental activist art.
Kerryn McMurdo – (1976) – New Zealand
While I am still here
While I am Still Here is an experimental intersection of dance, environmental activism and video art. This work offers a kinaesthetic, aural and visual experience, re-imagining a global and shared trauma. The body in this video (Kerryn’s body) dissolves and recreates itself. It’s agent of transformation, which is a part of Nature itself. As the artist strives to move towards a future where bodies of resources do not dissolve, but are made stable again, her artwork suggests that you have an active role, too. Climate change is real and accelerating upon us. If we do not take considerable action to transition into clean energy, within the next 60-70 years the damage caused will be irreversible to our lands, oceans, water supply, and living needs. Island nations are always progressive, as they are isolated from
mainlands and must utilize resources efficiently. Iceland can lead the way for a profitable and sustainable future, if it prioritizes this NOW.
Web: www.artilleryperformance.weebly.com
Nathalie La Hargue is a French artist based both in Iceland and France. She started her career with large-scale graphic installations in museums and public spaces across France as part as her work in the duo “Après vous” and as a solo artist. Since 2016, she is drawing and painting exclusively, investigating figurative representations of bodies, portraits and landscapes. This work at Djúpavík is her first step towards large-scale painting.
Nathalie La Hargue – (1988) – France
De mémoire d’homme
In living memory
Í manna minnum
In living memory is a triptych dedicated to these living beings who lived and still live in these curious landscapes of Iceland. They shaped it with their movements, sculpting some piddling, negligible parts of this untouched open space to survive in. However, the lively nature itself shapes people too, both body and soul, in an artistic way. Landscapes here are in control.
Web: nathalielahargue.tumblr.com
instagram.com/nathalie_la_hargue
facebook.com/nathalie.lahargue
Pauline Brami is a French artist interested in the fragility of the landscape and the ever-changing aspect of the natural elements. In Iceland, she has been focusing on minerals and water. She articulates her research about transforming rhythms in nature through her “mind maps” (levitating painting) and allegoric ceramics representing smoke, crystal and water flow.
Pauline Brami – (1990) – France
Mind Map
Trying to avoid a perpetual vertigo feeling, Pauline always get her anchor by observing and understanding how the natural environment has grown. In Iceland, she noticed a lot of elements she had never seen before, such as types of stones, dark-red ground and winding, black trees. The only marks she was able to follow were the tenuous veins that appear on the island’s map indicating rivers, paths, glaciers, mountain shapes, coasts, fjords, lakes…
Plastic Origin
This sculpture embodies a landscape, its strengths and its fragility. Clay flecked with basalt minerals represents smoke, which reflects the idea of earth expression (earth breath) and the origin of life (the significant amounts of reduced iron and manganese, present in basalt, provide potential energy sources for bacteria).
Web: cargocollective.com/paulinebrami
instagram.com/pauline_brami
For young Lithuanian sculptor Raimonda Sereikaitė-Kiziria, sculpture is a non-verbal way of telling a complex, multi-layered story. Often her works are based on a philosophical and many-sided approach to different topics which usually center around the inner world of the individual, modern human. The works deal with difficult-to-describe situations, internal experiences and the effects of different social and cultural contexts. The artist uses large objects, which by themselves have a skeleton that guides the work.
Raimonda Sereikaitė-Kiziria – (1989) – Lithuania
SUN
Sól
The piece called SUN stands in between sculpture and installation and speaks to your unfaithfulness to yourself. By combining kinetic and monumental art, this work is grounded in the site-specific art movement and its ideas (SUN is specially created for The Factory). Simple at first sight, yet multidimensional and complicated, SUN is devoid of any logical solution and requires the audience to look deeper and engage with it actively.
Rhona Taylor is an artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland, whose work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking and installations. She has travelled to Iceland several times; in 2016 she sailed from Reykjavík to the Westfjords on a tall ship, and in 2017 she spent two months at Nes Artists’ Residency in Skagaströnd.
Before studying fine art she worked as a journalist, and her work is strongly rooted in stories. She makes work in response to particular places, often in remote areas, and the people that live and work there. She’s particularly drawn to the sea, coast, islands and the extreme reaches of land. Much of her work looks at journeys and voyages, and the boundaries and transitions of place and time. She’s interested in
researching the history and memory of different places and is attracted to quietly unsettling locations.
Rhona Taylor – (1975) – United Kingdom
Vanishing Points
Vanishing Points is part of a body of work that began during the Icelandic fishing strike of 2017, when Rhona was on residency at Nes in Skagaströnd. The installation takes the navigational tracks of Icelandic fishing vessels as the starting point for a composition. The project as a whole explores the changing fishing industry, and the impact of those changes locally as well as further afield. During a period of huge political upheaval in the artist’s home country (the UK),
Vanishing Points also considers the connections and relationships between people in different places, and the impact they have on one another.
Web: www.rhonataylor.co.uk
instagram.com/rhonabtaylor
Sabine Adam Fischer is an interdisciplinary artist who works with various materials. Language is very present in her works. Like language, art can provoke thought experiments and create fictions. In her previous artworks, Fischer dealt with thoughts on human behaviour. She also engages with humour. For her, humour is not necessarily a trigger to laugh about the world but a means of gaining knowledge. As the potential starting point of a new or different way of thinking, it can be influential and become a power that actually change things.
Sabine Adam Fischer – (1979) – Germany
Soundtrack, Light and Wind
Soundtracks is a series of sound-works started here in Iceland. These sound-pieces are embedded in a particular surrounding and function as a virtual layer to that particular space. The sound-material includes elements of everyday noise, experimental field-recordings, electronic instrumentations, self-played instruments or singing and quotes from the mass-entertainment industry. These works want to provoke a sonic experience. Soundtracks emphasize the enormous impact that sound and music have on us. Music can trigger our emotions. Thus, Soundtracks references our daily lives and habits, which we sometimes forget and avoid.
Web: www.adamsfischer.com
Invited by the art manager.
Sarah Nance is an interdisciplinary artist based in Montréal, QC and Portland, OR. In her work, she constructs and documents relationships between light, geology and time, elements that contribute to an understanding of place. In her site-responsive installations, Nance utilizes the geology of each chosen site through found natural materials, such as rock, sea ice and sand. As a result, these works are uniquely of—
more than simply about—a place. Set in their singular landscapes, the installations draw perception from the place itself to the composite processes and elements that create that place. Nance’s recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Octave Cowbell in Metz, France; 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia; and Antenna in New Orleans, Louisiana, with an upcoming exhibition at FOFA Gallery in Montréal, Québec.
Sarah Nance – (1987) – United States
a veil to cover all stones
Nance is interested in the complex ways that human activity and geologic processes are entwined. In a veil to cover all stones, she uses the accumulative process of beading to create an open net, the slow technique mimicking the steady build-up of sedimentary material. The net is paired with a token of the geological landscape, such as a boulder. This object-coupling embraces the temporal fluctuations between the human and the geologic.
Web: www.sarahnance.com
instagram.com/sarahenance/
Sarah is a nonfiction writer and documentarian with a background in anthropology. She is interested in dwelling deeply in a place, the stories we make and relationships we have with our environments. She has lived across the world in various locations from the Equator to the Arctic. Following the financial crisis of 2008, she lived in Iceland’s Westfjords for a number of years, bearing witness to a period of immense environmental and social change, about which she is writing a memoir. She is currently a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Glasgow.
Sarah Thomas – (1980) – United Kingdom
Web: www.journeysinbetween.wordpress.com
Jonny is a freelance artist working with film and live performance in Cumbria, England. His practice involves primarily using documentary as a medium through which to bear witness to the unique stories of people and places. He is fascinated by the relationships between identity and landscape, particularly relating to ideas of north.
Jonny Randall – (1987) –United Kingdom
Web: www.jonrandall.net
Óshlíð: River Mouth \ Slope
A poetic short documentary which takes us on a journey along Óshlíð, an abandoned coastal road considered to be one of the most dangerous, and beautiful, in Iceland. Following its replacement by a mountain tunnel in 2010, the road was closed and is now being reclaimed by the mountain and the sea.
The film journeys into the stories of Óshlíð and its relationships with the people who maintained, travelled and died upon it. Through these voices it reflects upon the nature of mortality, inhabiting a landscape where humans are not the main characters.
Óshlíð is an Icelandic word comprised of ós (river mouth) and hlíð (slope). Óshlíð is both the name of the road, and the place from which it came and to which it will return.
Web: www.rivermouthslope.net
Sigga Björg Sigurðardóttir is a visual artist that lives and works in Reykjavík, Iceland. Sigga’s visual language is full of surreal or dark humor, fantasy and childhood nostalgia. Looking beyond such apparent qualities, it is interesting to consider the work on a more realistic level, as it reveals a penetrating analysis of human interaction and emotion. Her drawings and murals often explore the push and pull of human behaviour and relationships, the desire to both manipulate and be at one with another, as well as the subtleties of feelings such as desperation, obsession, love and fear. Her method of relentless drawing often reveals human behaviour and emotion in their most primitive and wild form, and explores the sometimes vague boundaries between human and beast.
Sigga received an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2004 and since then she has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions around the world. Her work can be found in many international collections.
Sigga Björg Sigurðardóttir – (1977) – Iceland
Signal
On a free-standing wall in the space I will create a large wall drawing. Along with the wall drawing I will install 3 sculptures, Rakel, Felix and Phone. The sculptures together with the wall drawings create an installation that suggests a narrative, although there may not be an obvious beginning or end. The visual narrative Signal is about being far away from the rest of the world, in the middle of nowhere (either because of location or as a state of mind), trying to connect with something real, something bigger, or just other people. We wait for signals. It is about desperation and enlightenment, the human need to be connected to something, and the ridiculous and sometimes extreme elements of human nature.
The viewer is invited to take part in this narrative, send a signal, make a phone call, phone home.
Web: www.siggabjorg.net
instagram.com/siggabjorg333/
Invited by the art manager.
Sigurður Ámundason’s work uses classical motifs like mythology, landscapes, life versus death, epic battles and metamorphosis to describe his inner psyche and conflicts. Everyday struggles of the ordinary person interest him, and he does his best to process the trivial concerns that occupy our minds.
Sigurður Ámundason – (1986) – Iceland
The Artist on his Deathbed
Listamaðurinn á dánarbeði sínu
This piece shows Sigurður on his own deathbed only moments away from slipping over to the great unknown. The large-scale pencil drawing is simultaneously dramatic and humorous, sincere and pretentious, epic and minimal, self-destructive and self-indulgent. Depicting an extremely vulnerably moment in Sigurður’s life that has not yet happened and hopefully won’t for a very long time, the work hopes to underline the duality of life and death. On the wall behind the drawing is an even larger-scale photograph. The photograph is the end scene of the film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where the title character lowers himself into lava like molten steel. The white cold features of the drawing are reminiscent of the winterscapes of Iceland and the burning molten steel hints toward the inner volcanic state underneath that very ice.
Web: sigurduramundason.tumblr.com
instagram.com/sigurduramundason
Invited by the art manager.
Tereza Kociánová is a Czech visual and mixed textile artist who studied in Slovakia and Poland and now lives in Iceland. Her artwork is inspired by landscape and the relationship between the human and nature. She sees her art as an unending searching of new possibilities and way to express oneself.
Tereza Kociánová – (1989) – Czech Republic
My Space
Mitt pláss
This collection of unique printed fabrics is inspired by landscape and the relation between human and nature. Kociánová was looking for the answer to the question, “What is the real place in my life?” My space is a reflection of one’s spiritual life. My space came after the artist spent time around Lake Mývatn. The local lava fields became a huge part of her daily life. After spending some time there, she felt strong
and powerful, and she wanted maintain those feelings. The piece isn’t necessarily an imitation of nature but an altar intended to print out a memory and keep the power of this place.
Web: www.behance.net/kocianova
instagram.com/terezianakocian
facebook.com/ilustration.textile.shoes.love
English