Threshold
LÁ Art Museum, 2015
Paper works, text works and sculptures
Paper, cardboard boxes, wood, plastic sheeting, water, mirrors.
Threshold was the title of a joint exhibition by Jóna Hlíf, Eygló Harðardóttir, Karlotta Blöndal, and Ólöf Helga Helgadóttir that was held at the LÁ Art Museum under the direction of curator Inga Jónsdóttir.
The focus of the exhibition was on paper works by the four women artists, a kind of artistic conversation about how paper as a form can be used in more ways than in two dimensions. The exhibition featured various iterations of paper and its process of transformation from wood to the material we know from everyday life. The eternal budding of paper united the works: the cycle of contemporary reprocessing means that paper is always on the way to becoming something else.
Jóna Hlíf's contribution to the exhibition was the works “Arkir,” and “Skuggsjá,” a four-work series about being, consisting of cardboard box sculptures with carved text and mirrors. What characterizes and connects the works is the emphasis on paper, but a theme that also runs through them all like a red thread is a suspenseful discussion on the phenomenon of society: What is a society, and in what kind of society will people live in Iceland? Connections to the debate on the new Iceland, which characterized the years after the collapse of 2008, appear in familiar slogans in the work “Skuggsjá”: Transparency - Determination - Society. The question of which values the future will be built on remains unanswered, but the slogans resonate with texts in an unnamed four-part series. Fiery red paper which deals with the conditions of someone imagined other than you, as a viewer, promises a meaning called for by the civic emphasis on stability (determination) and information flow (transparency). The unnamed series includes three textual works that deal with sympathy and being in a poetic but mysterious way, and one coloured paperwork which in blue and white tones deals with the emptiness that often lies behind questions about what something is. What is really the result of a definition other than to rephrase with text that something that is one thing is something else than it still is? The work “Skuggsjá” is accompanied by a text that originally appeared on the back of the book Hringekjan in 1969, a year that was characterized by economic disasters in Iceland with the collapse of the herring stock. The back-cover text focuses on the Icelandic society, what characterizes it, and how to expose hypocrisy; to shed light on what it really is, beyond what it is. The slogans Transparency - Determination - Society are attached to mirrors that may shed light on what the answer is to what society, or we, really are. The mirrors then reappear in cardboard box sculptures, where the viewers come face to face with themselves in all three boxes. In each work and on top of each box, words were cut out of paper, which together form the sentence: That we have become a surface.
The paper is like a person: variable arid, flexible, fragile, forgettable, beautiful, soft serving, empty, offering, giving, listening, broken, bent dried out, worn, importunate but inquisitive.
Wordplay / text by Becky Forsythe
Paper is personified with sensitivity and character, flexibility and response in the works of Jóna Hlíf Halldórsdóttir. Text and composing phrases are key to her creativity; where wordplay crafting and construction holds equal value in the reading of works. Words are a process through which Jóna Hlíf draws with paper, carves and manipulates the surface. Words like transparency, resolution, community hint to a sort of political system or framework that is questioned, but also longed for by the artist. Delicate and minimal, it is clear that the process of the works is complex, intricate and concise. By committing words and phrases to material in this way, Jóna Hlíf translates intangible thoughts to physical readings, from two- to three-dimension. Concrete thoughts as paper sculpture move us through contemplation, spoken language, pencil lines traced on paper, and cutout spaces that transform flat surfaces. The letters become permanent, solid representations, and the physical construction of phrases a way to draw and carve out paper with emotion.
The delicate spaces and surfaces found within Jóna Hlíf’s text works are evident in the Sheets (2015) series, where colour and shape work alongside the fragile and flexible, expanding surfaces of paper. In the larger context, a means to consider and reflect upon our own shifts and changes.
Photo credit: Vigfús Birgisson