Reykjavík Grapevine - 02.06.2017, Blaðsíða 27

27The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 09 — 2017
In the airy entrance hall
of Iceland’s National Gal-
lery, the institutional silence
is broken suddenly by the
echo of raucous laughter.
I follow my ears down the
stairs towards the spacious,
windowless exhibition space
of Gallery 1.
Passing through the doorway is
like stepping into another dimen-
sion—the white cube environment
has been transformed into a dizzy-
ing explosion of colour. Vast, hairy
tendrils hang from the every cor-
ner of the walls and ceiling, tan-
gling up into knots and junctions
over my head before branching out
again in a suspended web of reti-
na-scorching brightness.
Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, the
artist behind the installation,
is better known by her nom-de-
guerre Shoplifter, or “Shoppy”—
a nickname based on someone’s
mishearing of her forename. She
appears from a bustling crowd of
assistants and technicians with an
infectious grin on her face, which
nests in her own wild cloud of viv-
idly grey hair.
It’s the seventh installation in
her ‘Nervescape’ series, which has
changed shape and size dramati-
cally during its travels from New
York City to Los Angeles, Norway,
Sweden, Australia and now, Reyk-
javík. In some iterations, ‘Nerv-
escape’ has been like a shroud of
vines, cloaking the viewer on all
sides. Other versions are more like
a huge, bulbous beast squatting in
the gallery, spreading up the walls
and melting over the floors.
“It’s never really the same piece,”
says Hrafnhildur. “Each one is like
a new entity. I imagined something
like this when I saw the space, but I
never know how it’ll come out.”
HAIRY POLLOCK
The Reykjavík edition brings to
mind the micro and macro: the
vasts arms of nebulas, and the vis-
ceral network of nerves that hide
within the body, presented in the
hypernatural colour palette of ‘Av-
atar’’s sci-fi wilderness.
“I wanted to create a certain kind
of mapping,” says Shoppy. “Here
“When I was
envisioning my
life in Europe,
I was seeing
it in black and
white, and when
I thought about
New York it was
always in bright
colours. So I went
to the colour.”
Words:
John Rogers
Photos:
Axel Sig