"UP NORTH," Jacob Dahl Jürgensen & Simon Dybbroe Møller Ragnar Kjartansson, Kevin Schmidt, Art Gallery of Alberta, September 2, 2011 to January 8, 2012

×

1 of 5

Expand

"Flotsam and Jetsam"

Jacob Dahl Jürgensen and Simon Dybbroe Møller, "Flotsam and Jetsam," 2009 (-2011), Detail Video (13:44 min., colour, sound), found objects, vinyl record (24:03 min.). Installation dimensions varies. Courtesy Art Gallery of Alberta.

×

2 of 5

Expand

"Wild Signals"

Kevin Schmidt, "Wild Signals," 2007, HD video, PHOTO: Courtesy Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.

×

3 of 5

Expand

"Wild Signals"

Kevin Schmidt, "Wild Signals," 2007, HD video, PHOTO: Courtesy Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.

×

4 of 5

Expand

Production shot "The End,"

Ragnar Kjartansson, production shot "The End," (2009), Photo: Laura Vanags. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik.

×

5 of 5

Expand

"Flotsam and Jetsam"

Jacob Dahl Jürgensen and Simon Dybbroe Møller, "Flotsam and Jetsam," 2009 (-2011), Detail Video (13:44 min., colour, sound), found objects, vinyl record (24:03 min.). Installation dimensions varies. Courtesy Art Gallery of Alberta.

Prev

Next

UP NORTH

Jacob Dahl Jürgensen & Simon Dybbroe Møller Ragnar Kjartansson, Kevin Schmidt

Art Gallery of Alberta

September 2, 2011 to January 8, 2012

By Ross Bradley

It seems appropriate that the Art Gallery of Alberta should follow up their recent Exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965 – 1980 (June 25th to September 25, 2011), with a look at current practice in this challenging genre of the visual arts. In my mind, “Conceptual Art” focuses on the exploration of ideas rather than the more traditional creation of objects. The artist often seems to be asking the question “What if?”, and then proceeds to test the possibilities, without worrying about the creation of something that can hang on a gallery wall or sit on a plinth. So, when it comes to a gallery exhibition of conceptual art the audience will often see a documentation of the process rather than a resulting artwork. This is not always the case though as we can see in Calgary artist Eric Cameron’s workCabbage in the Traffic exhibition. Here the idea of meticulously encasing a head of cabbage in thousands of layers of gesso not only answers the question “What if?” but the answer also results in a sensuous beautiful object in and of itself.

The new generation of conceptual artists, in the Art Gallery of Alberta’s exhibition Up North, still pose that “What if” question but the exhibition only give us a glimpse of the answers. Here we see four works by artists that are linked geographically, as they all are based in countries that include the arctic as part of their native landscape. Their art practice however, is based in both classical and modern European traditions rather than those of the indigenous peoples of the regions. Three of the works are also linked by their central theme of music al fresco and are the focus of this review.

Flotsam and Jetsom (sic), by Danish artists Jacob Dahl Jürgensen & Simon Dybbroe Møller harkens back to the found object sculpture of Marcel Duchamp or the more recent Arte Povera movement of 1960s Italy. The artists with a group of collaborators transform bits and pieces of natural and manmade objects into improvisational instruments which are then “played” and recorded on the desert island where the pieces were found. The exhibition includes the recorded sounds (I hesitate to call it music) and a video of the creation and performance, along with the artifacts/instruments displayed as sculptures.

Canadian artist Kevin Schmidt’s Wilde Signalstransplants American pop culture into the desolate winter landscape of Canada’s Yukon. Based on the theme music from Steven Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he inserts a sound and light installation in the misty arctic night, creating manmade northern lights, to communicate to an unknown and unseen audience.

The third musical performance piece, Ragnar Kjartansson’s The End, also has a Canadian connection as the Icelandic artist created the piece as part of a residency at the Banff Centre. Kjartansson and his partner, dressed in stereotypical frontier garb of deerskin jackets and coonskin hats, use the frigid mountain landscape, including a grand piano installed in the middle of a frozen, snow covered Lake Minnewanka, to produce a folk/country video played out on five wall size screens that surround the visitor. Each screen shows the duo playing a different set of instruments, with the sound track melding the eight different players into a single musical work.

Is the fact that the artists come from circumpolar countries reflected in the work? Certainly they all reflect the “idea of wilderness as a site for aesthetic contemplation as well as artistic action” but that does not necessarily equate to an arctic landscape. Flotsam and Jetsom, with its lush undergrowth and ocean vista could easily have been filmed on an island in Greece and Schmidt’s winter scenes could have been done in the mountains of Chile or the steppes of Mongolia.

As is so often the case with conceptual art, the audience is far removed from the actual work or the experience of that work. In all three pieces, one only gets an edited glimpse of the artist’s idea, without any of the actual impact that the wilderness landscape and harsh environment had on the artists, in the creation of the works. In today’s high-tech world, it is also difficult to capture, much less hold, the attention of an audience that is used to big budget, Hollywood 3-D productions. Most of the visitors in the gallery, the day I was there, barely spent a couple of minutes with any of the video projections and few if any actually stayed to watch the full piece.