The End: Ragnar Kjartansson
January 30 to April 18, 2010 ·Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, January 28 · 4 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Opening Reception: Friday, January 29 · 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Country & Western Hour: Friday, January 29 · 9:30 p.m.
At the 2009 Venice Biennale, Iceland’s representative Ragnar Kjartansson performed as a painter for six months and exhibited the video installation, The End — Rocky Mountains shot in the Canadian Rockies. This month, Walter Phillips Gallery brings The End back to The Banff Centre where it was originally produced. Drawing on scenic locations around Banff, the video installation depicts two musicians – Kjartansson and his collaborator, Davíð Þór Jónsson – playing a blend of folk-country and experimental music in the midst of a frigid winter. Dressed as northern frontiersmen, they play with stereotypical and fictional impressions of the west.
In an email to his friend Andjeas Ejiksson — part of a series of missives collected for the Biennale — Kjartansson describes his time working on The End, in Banff. “On the second week we recorded the video out there in chocking beauty and frost as low as -29. Fingers purple and numb and chords disappearing into the crystals. Two of our soundmen went to hospital with a frostbite. It has been an utterly enjoyable existence but I am afraid I am nowhere nearer to understanding the Rocky Mountains. They are everywhere, on clocks, calendars, and desktops. This image of bliss, heaven, and tranquility. In the waiting rooms and bars of the world they hover over our collective misery.”
Ragnar Kjartansson lives and works in Reykjavik. Kjartansson is a performance artist who is continually experimenting with different media. His work garnered international attention with a contribution to the 2005 Reykjavik Arts Festival, where he staged an abandoned meeting house in the countryside of southern Iceland. He presented Schumann Machine in 2008 atManifesta 7, a restaging of Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe as a psychedelic and absurd loop. is one of Iceland’s leading jazz musicians, and a noted composer of music for theatre, film, and art installations.
The End — Rocky Mountains was supported in part by the Stephan and Adriana Benediktson Fellowship for Icelandic Artists at The Banff Centre.
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