Back in the USA

I’ve made it back in one piece after a completely un-noteworthy travel day.

One of the last things I learned before leaving, though, is that Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song is about Iceland, written after they went there to play. “We come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow.” I usually don’t pay enough attention to lyrics, but this seems like a big miss on my end. So obvious. Had I known, I would’ve been blasting Immigrant Song for the last five weeks. Instead, it served as my goodbye song, playing as I took off and caught my last glimpse of the island.

My regular posting is done now, but I’m going to be going back through my images to see if I can find other things to post on here, and starting the second week of August, I’ll be posting some of the photos I shot on film. I’ll try to remember to send out an update when I do that, but you should check back in sometime in mid-August to see the work I was making while there.

Last post from Iceland

I´m just finishing up cleaning the apartment and making sure I´m not leaving anything behind. I´ll post from New York to let you know that I´ve arrived in one piece.

Rewind

Here´s a collection of images from throughout my time here that didn´t really fit in with any of the other posts. The first one was taken yesterday, and it´s these little birds creeping under the fence to eat dropped fried onions at the most popular hot dog stand in Reykjavik. After this, no comments, just pictures. Enjoy.

Back to the beginning

This was the first picture I took upon arriving in Iceland, right around midnight. I just realized that I haven´t experienced a real night or darkness in almost a month and a half. It´s kind of odd to realize that it´ll get dark tomorrow, and well before midnight, too.

Two bowls

I´m leaving tomorrow, which of course means I´m up late procrastinating. I think it´s odd how well these two go together. One from the cheap dormitory part of a cheap hotel and the other from a nice church.

The Shark Museum!

This´ll almost certainly be my last interesting post from Iceland. I leave Wednesday evening, which is now a day and a half away. Weird. So luckily this one´s a good one.

Just outside Stykkisholmur is the Shark Museum. Apparently this is the last year of the museum as they are closing up shop. A shame as it´s pretty great. It´s run by an older couple and I guess they´re just getting tired. I actually took a picture of the sign pointing in its direction on my first time through without knowing what it was here´s that picture.

And from there we´ll go straight into the sharks. Mmm. Apparently in the old days when they went fishing in plain wooden boats, upon catching the sharks, they would have to immediately pull the spinal column out all in one piece. If they left the spinal column in the shark would thrash around causing the boat to rock, which in a small boat would cause real problems. If you left even a portion of the spine in, that small part would thrash, so it was a necessary skill to be able to slice it off at the head and yank the spine out from the tail. Here´s a picture of a severed shark head and the tail at the end of the intact column.

Here´s an enormous shark jaw with the conveyor belt of teeth.

This is not a Matthew Barney prop or an Uta Barth piece, but shark eggs! It was found on the wall of “Things found inside sharks.”

Here´s a bunch of other things found inside sharks. Something´s tail, a starfish, something else, A POLAR BEAR’S MANGLED PAW!, and some skull.

Here are two more shark heads. A nice intact one…

…and one stretched over a large blue thing that may or may not be a buoy.

Apparently sharks can´t pee or have no livers or something like that so most people think you can´t eat shark meat. It turns out that you just leave the meat hanging for months to basically rot and all the bad stuff leaches out of it, then you can eat the meat. Wonderful. After having tasted the shark, Sara took me out back to see where the shark meat was hanging. It´s basically a barn with no lower walls and inside are just rafters with nails and chunks of meat hanging everywhere. I ducked inside to take pictures, and damn near passed out. Overwhelming is an understatement for the smell.

I was fed the shark meat before I saw the hanging, festering meat. I was just presented with this nice table with some dried fish, two horns with toothpicks and this little tupperware with small white chunks of shark. Sara warned me that the shark meat was potent, but boy was it ever. Pretty chewy, and with the power of fish x10, I was a little overwhelmed. Luckily Sara foresaw this inevitability and had brought sweeties (as the British like to call candy) with her, so I was saved by fruity, gummy goodness.

Here are a few things also found in the shark museum not related to sharks. Here are a bunch of taxidermied animals. Fierce.

And here are some horse legs severed at the joint hanging with some old reins and such.

Hopefully you´ve all enjoyed these wonderful oddities as much as I did. Yummy.

Back in Stykkisholmur… on a boat!

Some of you may have been wondering where I´ve been the last few days. The answer is Stykkisholmur! I befriended this half Icelandic, half British painter who works at the Library of Water when I visited at the beginning of my time here, and she invited me back up. So in an effort to escape my broken camera funk I skeddadled out of Reykjavik and into the small harbor town of Stykkisholmur. This was also nice because I´ve had very little real contact with actual Icelanders. Most of the friends I´ve made have been other foreign artists. Seems like all I could meet. So it was nice to stay with an Icelandic (though half British) family for a few days. Sara´s uncle, who also lives with her here used to be a fisherman and still has a boat (called Snót, pronounced Snote, not Snot, which is an affectionate term for little ones) took Sara, Rebecca (a writer here on residency who has worked with my professor back at ASU) and I out to explore the islands off the coast.

This first picture is of us leaving the harbour behind.

Here´s Sara and Rebecca marvelling at something.

The continental plates around here are pushing and pulling the tiny island of Iceland. Here is where a push has forced these basalt columns up. There are well over a hundred little islands and most of them have varying patterns of basalt columns.

 

These ones actually curve back up!

We stopped on two of the islands. The first one used to be owned by her uncle Magnos, but he sold it and now owns the second one we visited. He was wandering around trying to decide where to build a house. I guess living in a town of a little over 1000 is suffocating him and he has to get away. These flowers look like fairy hair, with that fire twist. Or maybe it´s where fairy hairdressers practice the twist hairstyle in fairy hairdresser school.

http://images.elfwood.com/art/c/i/cindysue/firefairy.jpg

This is a little hard to see in these pictures, but it´s the site of ancient viking ruins. You can see twin diagonal lines on both the left and right side of the clearing. These were where the viking houses used to be. There are viking remains and viking stories all over the area, and I got to hear about lots of them.

This rock perched between the cliffs was apparently thrown by Gudrun, a viking woman, I believe. There was a troll sitting amongst the rocks and she was throwing rocks to try to get him. Apparently there´s another one nearby.

This is the site where the vikings would hang their criminals. They would put a piece of wood over the opening and hang them in the crevice.

Apparently this little island was the spot where Erik the Red hid for months or years or something when being chased by someone or other. Obviously I´ve forgotten the details except that it was Erik the Red, he was hiding, and he stayed hidden for quite awhile on this little rock.

And we also got to see lots of great animals. Those I couldn´t adequately capture on film include puffins,– which are hilarious when they fly, as they look kind of like penguins in the air with little wings flapping very quickly– a big white seal, seagull type things (that apparently aren´t seagulls) nesting with cute fluffy babies, and enormous white tailed eagles. I do have a nice picture of cormorant nests, though. I like how they contrast nicely against the white shit covered rock walls.

And here´s a baby eagle sitting in its nest. I photographed it through binoculars. One eye on one side and the digital camera lens up against the other side. Lucky me. At one point on one of the islands a huge tour boat went by, and they all waved at us, and we knew how jealous they were that we got to hang out on the island while they just float by. Sweet. Baby eagle.

Berit Lindfeldt at Start Art Gallery

Here´s an excerpt from the translated text written by Marie Lundquist for the catalogue from Swedish sculptor Berit Lindfeldt´s current show now up in Reykjavik at Start Art Gallery titled “Little Sleep and other sculptures.”

“In the fury of visual images so characteristic of our times, her object-like sculptures compete on their own special terms. They resonate with a more delicate timbre; this says nothing about their strength. Once a tone becomes clear and audible, it enters our consciousness, filling it with a monumental, primeval force. Like a whisper in a cathedral.”

Some of that might sound familiar to those of you who´ve heard me try to talk about my work recently. Needless to say, I can relate to that sentiment and I really enjoyed this show that opened up as I spent time with it. The gallery had 10 pieces in it scattered around the room. I´ll show most of them here. The first two images are broader installation shots.

Here are most of the individual pieces.

The above piece was one of the ones that helped me to see the show in a new way. I liked it when I first saw it, but I just figured it was an abstracted deconstruction of furniture. The titles were written in pencil on the wall in two languages, neither of them being english, so at first I didn´t know what the titles were, but then I found a sheet with english translations. This one was titled “Vase”. I looked at it again and had one of those light bulb switching on moments. Here´s another more obvious shot of it.

Start Art is a collective gallery run similarly to the gallery I recently joined in Phoenix, Five15 Arts. It was the result of a group of artists deciding that they were sick of not being able to break in to the few major galleries and seeking an alternative venue to show new work on a regular basis. They have a fantastic space with an upstairs and downstairs gallery right on one of the main shopping streets. I have been in talks with them about doing a trade show, with Start Art having a show at Five15 and Five15 having a show at Start Art. It´s exciting to meet like-minded people in an art scene halfway around the world.

Cars

Here´s the car I´ve been driving while in Iceland. It´s a touch dusty after our drive out to Dettifoss and back on the dirt road. This was taken during the gloaming at Asbyrgi. Note the Jesus fish. Yes, I´ve been driving around in a car advertising its love of Christ. Weird. Very weird, but I´ve driven countless kilometers and slept many nights in it, and aside from the one flat tire, it´s treated me pretty well, so I´m not about to judge.

And here´s a ridiculously nice car that was just sitting in someone´s driveway. I like the contrast of these two next to each other.

My walk home yesterday

Here´s a mini photo essay from my walk home yesterday.