Ragnar Kjartansson: The End
January 30 – April 18, 2010
Ragnar Kjartansson production shot The End (2009) Photo: Laura Vanags.
Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York; and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik.
“In Canada, I will make a video that will make me cry. In unbearable frost and thin air I shall hold my shivering dried-up heart in my hand….”
— Ragnar Kjartansson
A self-described radical post-romantic, the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson traveled westbound towards the Rocky Mountains in search of the epic. Working primarily as a performance artist, Kjartansson is known for his spectacular and humorous stagings of extreme character types, from the knight and rock outcast to the lonely crooner. In Banff the artist sought to create a cacophonic folk-country music video in the guise of a Davy Crockett-clad outlaw. Drawing on the nostalgic representations of nature found in sources as varied as paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and the cover of the Supertramp album Even in the Quietest Moments, his work is a dramatized engagement with Canada’s frontier.
The End -- Rocky Mountains is a five-channel video installation synched together as a single disfigured country music arrangement in the chord of G. Produced with the support of The Banff Centre for the Icelandic Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, the piece was developed by Kjartansson in collaboration with Icelandic musician Davíð Þór Jónsson at the Centre in February 2009.
While composing the soundtrack for The End Kjartansson and Þór Jónsson regularly journeyed through the nearby woods to their studio, and drank bourbon while immersing themselves in war poetry and the music of the Byrds, Townes Van Zant, and the Band among others.
Kjartansson and Þór Jónsson then filmed and recorded the song’s instrumental parts in five idyllic and sublime sites around Banff in temperatures as low as -20 degrees Celsius. The resulting projections were arranged to echo one another, Kjartansson and Þór Jónsson performing multiple parts of the same song in the guise of somewhat ambiguous country musicians.
Using the Rocky Mountains as a stage set to perform the historically romanticized role of the artist in the landscape, Kjartansson questions the cultural narratives that mediate our experiences of nature. All the while the work’s melancholic beauty and intoxicating soundtrack prove overwhelmingly romantic, eliciting a curiosity in the contemporary abyss.
— Tatiana Mellema
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, January 28, 4 p.m.
Walter Phillips Gallery
Opening Reception: Friday, January 29, 7 p.m.
Walter Phillips Gallery
Country & Western Hour: Friday, January 29, 9:30 p.m.
Walter Phillips Gallery
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