Inga Þórey, our curator placed our work: My 3-dimensional collages at one end to the left as you entered the gallery, Soffia's large charcoal  drawings on the long wall, her scrolls in a vitrine  Elva's prints next to Soffia's drawings and toward the far end where, in a recess, Inga installed our collaborative piece.  Two short walls, perpendicular to the window wall, the vitrine and a pedestal broke up the space and added rhythm.

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Above and Below the Horizon
Soffia, like many island inhabitants, is focused on the horizon and in much of her painting work, she places herself on the ground looking directly out. This puts her and us in a strong and solid place vis a vis our surroundings. When Soffia became interested in Marie Tharp's maps of the ocean floor, she first drew this underwater vision as a journey-story on scrolls, where one can imagine a small Soffia traveling across under water to Places Unknown.  Only a part of the story is visible, the rest is rolled up.  The position of the artist and the ‘reader’ is on the bottom of the sea looking out as if, even here, we are looking at a horizon.  In powerful charcoal drawings, Hidden Landscapes , our sea bed exploration is enlarged to life size.

While Soffia stands and looks; Elva sits down to touch and feel the earth's crust.  Elva pays close attention to the surface of the earth: the textures and lines of lava fields, mosses, and rocks in her homeland. She conveys them in lovely evocative prints. Often the images are small honing in on a microscopic detail; while in the series of six larger collographs Written By Nature, our view is expanded.  Elva uses elements from the earth to create her matrices, adhering sand and other material to her metal plates.  Inspired by our collaboration, she asked me to bring sand from Cape Cod so that she could use the sand from the Reykjanes peninsula and sand from across the sea on the New England Coast.  In this way, her work and mine reference each other in nuanced ways.   Four of Elva's small collographic plates were exhibited on a pedestal allowing visitors to the exhibit to see and understand her process.
       
FOR WRITING ON MY WORK, SEE PREVIOUS POST

Our opening reception on November 11 was well attended.  A local painter had an exhibit in another gallery at the museum and a cultural award was given to a choirmaster from Keflavik where the museum is located.  Before the galleries were opened a folk group played, we were all introduced, and a youth choir sang.  There were between 500-600 people in the museum that evening.

 Two days later Elva, Sofia, and I gave talks about our work to an audience of 30+ people, more than usually attend I was told.  I spoke first in English, the two Icelandic artists in Icelandic and then in English Soffia and I talked about our collaboration.  There were questions asked and much interest in our work.  I was introduced to a friend of Elva's a geologist who was interested in my work about Reykjanes and shared her knowledge of the relationship between the geothermal plant and the changes taking place in Gunnuhiver.  I have to get in touch with her to continue that dialogue.  The museum produced a beautiful catalogue with a CV and four pages of images for each artist, images from our collaboration, and distance shots of the installations in the museum.  We received national attention.  On November 11, the morning of our opening an article with photographs about our show was published in the Morgenbladid.  We were featured on the nightly news on November 22  www.ruv.is/sarpurinn/ruv/tiufrettir/20161122
And the university website had a long review of the exhibit. 
All this was wonderful, but most important is that I have two friends for life.

 This installation was not  completed until It was hung in the museum.  I needed to see what space it would occupy and how I wanted it to look in situ.  I knew that I wanted the piece to hang away from the wall with the more abstract elements (as above) further away from the wall than the elements that showed location.  I chose to use magnets on steel screws of different dimensions to create a sense of movement.  Receiving advice from friends Gene Turitz and David Martin, i attached washers and small discs to the back of the pieces.  These discs  lined  up with the screws on which we put small strong magnets.  Teddi, who helped me install this piece on the second day, had fun with the process so we both had fun. The piece is called Undertow: Cape Cod.  I consider it a work-in-progress and will show it in different configurations in the future.  One opportunity will be in the Inside/Out gallery run by the Somerville Art Council in June 2017.  The image below shows the wall at the museum with Undertow: Cape Cod.

I knew what the installation, Reykjanes: Gunnuhiver's Ghost, would look like before it left my studio.  It was to be a tryptich and I had had planned very carefully, the spacing between the three sections and the depth of earth's crust that I wanted to express.  I  bought screws of 1", 2.5", 3", and 4" so that the volatility of the geothermal landscape it refered to would be felt by those looking at the piece.  It was, as installed, also about 10 ft across.  It was much harder to install and was frustrating to Halli who was helping me.  Because the sections were heavier than that of Undertow, I had over-estimated how many magnets and screws would be needed.  I'd been encouraged to hang it as if it might be jostled or pushed by visitors to the museum, so was over-careful.    I had pushed myself to create work of greater complexity and size than I usually do. That I chose to do this under a deadline was something I have to re-think for the future,  I was quite stressed in the months leading up to October when I had to ship the work to Iceland.  But the reason I keep doing what I do is because I like to challenge myself and continue to develop new ideas and new ways of expressing thse ideas.   In the end, the stress was worth it.
This piece was greatly admired and  I felt successful. Gunnuhiver's Ghost has been acquired by the museum.  It couldn't be in a more appropriate collection. 
                  
                                                                              

I'm excited about the work Elva, Soffia, and I started together (see last post) and want to make it my own. For now I'm taking a break from sculptural collages to work on expanding our collaborative piece, creating mixed media prints, painting & drawing into and onto the prints. I'm looking forward to seeing where this will take me intellectually and aesthetically. I want to bring back text, graphs, equations into my work. And research into global warming effect on oceans and the sea floor.
review.pdf

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The piece, combines three different printmaking methods, digital printing, etching and collography and incorporates drawing, text, and equations. 
Working on a collaborative piece always has unexpected results, and this is certainly the case with the piece done with Elva and Soffia for our show, Við sjónarrönd/Above and Below the Horizon  in Keflavik.  In a collaboration, each artist has to give up ownership and allow the work to exist in a shared space. It is a very freeing experience for me and one that can develop into new work for me after.

We took as our starting point, maps of the ocean floor created by Marie Tharp,  an American geologist and oceanographic cartographer who, in partnership with Bruce Heezen, created the first scientific map of the entire ocean floor in the 1950s. Tharp's work revealed the presence of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, causing a paradigm shift in earth science that led to acceptance of the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift.  Coincidentally, Soffia and I had both been inspired by these topographical maps and decided to work collaboratively on this underwater landscape that separates and connects our two countries.  The Atlantic ridge which indicates the fissure between the North American and the Eurasian plates rises out of the water to create Iceland.  
HOW WE WORKED:
I scanned and downloaded images of the ocean floor, altered them in Photoshop, and printed a selection of 11 x 17 inch rectangles on Hahnemuhle German Etching Inkjet paper.  In May of 2016, I  brought 20+ images  to Reykjavik and the three of us poured over them to choose those we wanted to modify.  Back home, I reproduced the chosen images and sent them to my friends in Iceland. The idea was that each of us would have a hand in the creation.   Soffia and Elva then added elements on the digital prints using  etching o rcollography.  Soffia brought their modified images to New York to see what I thought.  I photographed them and then added another layer with text, equations and drawing. Each rectangle has the hand of at least two of us.  Sjónarrendur/The Horizon, presented a grid of 15 of our images chosen by our curator, Inga Thorey.  It received attention in an article about the exhibit printed in a national newspaper the day of our opening.  In an interview for the article, Soffia expressed our desire to continue with this project.  A review of the exhibit mentions that this brings together the themes and concerns that the three artists share. 

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