Place Enfolded, Site Unfolded
By Eve Heisler
The modernist gallery space that Richard Serra characterized as a "well-lighted white shoebox" is fractured and refolded in Katrin Sigurdardottir’s installation at Reykjavik Art Museum’s Harbor House. A wall spirals from the column of one room, zigzags across an indoor bridge that overlooks the cavernous space of a former packing house, and folds into itself in a second room. The wall bends this way and that like a folding screen; its height varies with the result that the top of the wall evokes the jagged profile of coastline or mountain ridge. (The allusion is less to natural forms than to the history of architecture in Iceland that, since the early twentieth-century, has experimented with integrating native materials and geologic forms into modernist practices.) The wall is smooth and white on one side and unfinished on the other; because of the wall’s jigsaw through space, the viewer, from any position, is faced with both the inside and outside of the same wall.
The doubling of inside-outside and the dramatic shifts in scale–the wall may tower above the viewer or stretch at one’s feet like a toy building–splinter the experience of space from that of passage and enclosure to puzzle or miniature stage. In the second room, the wall spirals into a cove strung with dollhouse lights; it is a precarious enclosure in which one risks toppling the stretch of tiny wall. Because of the constant shift in scale, the viewer cannot move mindlessly but must pay attention to the wall’s fluctuations. Like a maze, Sigurdardottir’s wall propels and bewilders. The installation extends the artist’s ongoing preoccupations with the experience of place and its antithesis, site. Place enfolds; site unfolds; and Sigurdardottir is particularly interested in the ways in which the body–the body of the artist and the body of the viewer–are situated and tested in these processes.
An Icelandic artist based in New York, Sigurdardottir encounters Iceland as both insider and outsider. Her work, which ranges from drawing and sculpture to video and multi-media installation, often circles around utopic and dystopic notions of "home." In this installation, the viewer’s alternating experiences of intimacy and distance parallel the psychological experience of being simultaneously engulfed and abandoned by the home. The clean white wall is a surface onto which one may hang one’s fantasies, but the screen pleats and one finds that to face the screen is also to find oneself behind it, or in the wings.
