Haraldur Jonsson
dal 22/1/2003 al 8/2/2003
Segnalato da
22/1/2003
Haraldur Jonsson
i8 Gallery (old location), Reykjavik
Haraldur Jonsson will show photographs from the series 'galaxy' and the sculptures 'blackholes for home', two for adults and one for a child.
On Thursday, January 23rd, at 5 p.m. an exhibition with new works by
Haraldur Jónsson will open at i8 gallery.
Haraldur Jonsson will show photographs from the series 'galaxy' and the
sculptures 'blackholes for home', two for adults and one for a child.
Haraldur Jonsson's "Galaxy" greets the viewer with a dense star cluster of
lamps, huddled together to give and receive warmth, a temporary community of
designed commodities not yet sold, arbtrarily joined by function. Despite
the clamor of incommensurable "styles" of lamp, upon closer examination a
touching kind of family resemblance emerges, the lamps quietly arguing
amongst themselves, as families do. While the switched on appliances
exchange opinions about design principles, their darkened cousins dream of
the offices, homes, and apartments they may someday inhabit. Someday, but
not tonight, not in the still, electric night that Jonsson observes. Seen
under plexiglass and separated from the viewer by a kind of virtual
storefront, the possibility of ownership is deferred and held at bay. Some
of the photographs in the group push this gambit further by including the
reflective storefront glass, metal panes splitting the image in half, and
locking the viewer out. Prodded via email about his lamp photographs,
Jonsson confirms this tactic, and expands it: "I wanted to document them as
light chapels, baroque temples of vanity but also as the temporally lost
paradises of the closed light shop." When viewed en masse these lamps
threaten to drown the viewer in a tide of non-differentiation that is far
from cozy, a paratactic plenitude of all styles ( . . . and . . . and . . .
and . . . ) whose open-endedness leaks outwards and grows fuzzy as it
recedes into the darkness at the back of these shops. Sidestepping the
branded rationalism of Ikea or the aura of exclusivity proper to a dealer in
antiques, Jonsson's light shop teems with gloriously incompatible
merchandise, and this dissonance is what makes the photographs so richly
dense, and more than a little ridiculous: plastic wrapped lamp shades
squatting above faux-Grecian urns recline next to sleekly phallic Art
Nouveau trifles, basking under the glowing jellyfish of crystal chandeliers,
beside would-be rustic columnar braziers, while amoeboid modernist art glass
seems to swim beneath a dense foliage of electrified rococo candles.
Jonsson's reference to the baroque is telling: this overripe cornucopia of
immaculate electrical commodities mirrors (ie. doubles and reverses) the
shattered, fragmentary eloquence of Piranesi and Salvator Rosa's penchant
for artfully disintegrating classical bric-a-brac. If they pined for a lost
golden age and registered their own historical absence from it by limning
its decay, Jonsson locates such emotions squarely within a marketplace in
which consumer choice promises the possibility of a customized regulation of
the particulars of one's designed environment, but remains haunted by the
impossible superabundance of that marketplace as a totality. Choosing one
lamp is no substitute for choosing ALL the lamps in the shop, and yet it is
what we as consumers resign ourselves to, lest we succumb to the
storefront's interminable seductions. If, as Kierkegaard tells us, "the
moment of decision is the moment of madness", Haraldur Jonsson's "Galaxy"
series suspends us at the the brink of such a madness, hovering in the
moment of flickering consumer indecision, basking in the imagined community
of objects.
Drew Daniels
Opening: Thursday, January 23rd, at 5 p.m.
Opening hours: Thursdays and Fridays from 11 am to 6 pm, Saturdays from 1 pm - 5 pm and by appointment.
i8 - Klapparstig 33 - 101 ReykjavÃk - SÃmi: 551 3666 / 690 4960 - Fax.:
5513666