As The Sun Rises
As The Sun Rises is an exhibition that was inspired by the Drake's participation in A Taste of Iceland, cultural festival. Working on the programming of that event, I encountered an amazing group of artists including Hrafenkell Sigurdsson and was reminded of the brilliance of Finbogi Petursson. However, it was the work of The Icelandic Love Corporation that I found almost impossibly dynamic. Working in performance, photography, sculpture and installation. This collective explores notions of identity, whether it is personal or cultural and how it can change or evolve through different challenges and circumstances.
Such an interesting experience to match that work with the Drake, a place that has been invented and reinvented countless times over the last century; and continues to evolve from the morning's cafe crowd to the evening's high rolling diners and the club kids that keep the joint rockin’ almost till dawn.
The works of The Icelandic Love Corporation ground this show with recent projects and early photographs and video from their series Where Do We Go From Here and Intimacy Circus. These works see the collective assuming the roles of post-modern elfin creatures as they push beyond the limits of their themselves and are reborn through challenge, camaraderie, love and pain.
More recently the Love Corp collaborated with Icelandic cultural chameleon Bjork on promotional imagery for her Volta album that was released in 2007 and photographed by Icelandic fashion photographer Bernhard Ingimundarson. Here Bjork dons the Love Corps wearable soft sculptures, transforming from pop diva to psychedelic woodland creature in bright, bold images.
Be sure to take a few moments with a quiet jewel in this exhibition, the Love Corp's recent video work, entitled Dynasty. This piece, commissioned by The Natural World Museum in 2007, presents the collective exploring notions of cultural heritage, evolution and the effect of changing social roles in an incredibly sophisticated, understated piece.
Other works in the exhibition address the construction of personal and cultural identity through works by artists from Toronto, New York and Berlin.
In the vestibule, Edith Dakovic's (Berlin) inflatable sculptures take the form of flotation devices - life preserves, water wings and life jackets - made in a material that looks like living human skin. Inviting the viewer to question the limits of our own physicality and how those limits can be mutable through different experiences, tools or even moods.
Jessica Craig-Martin is a photographer from New York City, who surreptitiously photographs guests at high society fundraising events. The resulting images, seen in Drake’s lobby function like fragments of overheard conversation, taken out of context. Here, a gorgeous, shoe, gloved hand or elegant martini glass loom large, creating a subtle but stinging tension between the glamour and excess seen in the images and the implied suffering associated with the beneficiary of the event.
Next door, in the Café, Toronto-based photographer Toni Hafkenschield plays with our assumptions of photographic images through subtle pictures of architectural models that appear to be landscape photographs. With careful lighting and controlling depth of field Hafkenschield's photos seem perfectly authentic shots of a parking garage, intersection or hillside motel. But look closely and some the more naive details start to come through, such as a chunky plastic tree. Step back again and the image seems to percolate with the tension between the artificiality of the model and the photograph that makes it appear to be reality.
As The Sun Rises continues till June 2, 2008. Special thanks go out to all who made this exhibition possible including Galleri I8, Reykavik; Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York City, Birch Libralato Gallery, Toronto; p|m Gallery, Toronto.
As well as the gracious assistance of NunaNow, Winnipeg and Iceland Naturally.
