IslANDs - Compressed Realities - Exploded Photoworks

Interview with Gudjon Bjarnason
by Mridula Sharma
As a man of diverse experiences and a broad academic
background your work relies on the interplay between
seeming opposites, structure and the void, or possibly control
and chaos. Can you speak to the symbiotic relationship
between these forces and their active conceptualization in
your work?
My multimedia art projects, be it photography, painting,
sculpture or architecture, etc. work very much with the
dialectics of contradiction, unresolved tension and turbulent,
confrontational states of being in terms of psychology and
opposing forces. The interplay and often violent collision
of chaos and order, light and dark, being and nothingness,
individual free will and the oppressions of mass society are
the pivot points of my activity. My structures and “negative”
images that fuse and integrate abstraction and the real and
aim at stretching standard recognized limits and methods of
creation far beyond the norm in an attempt to create a metalanguage
of higher synthesis. A sort of a stoic stance in the face
of conflict, groundlessness and rapid uncontrollability which
characterizes very much our cultural, social and political life
in contemporary times.
Despite, the dark “negative” undertone I view my work
as a very positive contribution to our cultural debate and
decision making – my aim is to accept the disintegration of
our fiber and spatial fabric and introduce grace and creative
novelty into that realm through acceptance rather than
the avoidance and blind eyes of our troubled states. In a
certain way, I find it the task and historical responsibility of
the creative herd, be it artist or architects, etc. to objectify
and abstractly symbolize our human condition through our
subjective imagination which of course is something of an
oxymoron. But of course art-making allows this kind of play
to take place within its limitless logic and set of rules which is
of course quite wonderful.
I’m in favor of many things: the merging of opposites, non
exclusional thinking, frozen movements of extreme motions,
irreconcilable contradictions, unresolved transformations
and end game materializations. Explosions have become
a way for me to open up stagnant modes of being and
thinking both literally and figuratively. The explosion of
precisely ordered geometric steel profiles, often set up in
orderly fashion opens up figuratively the formerly stale
and meaningless and inactive voids within by exposing the
interior of the transformed object. Thus the thing, which
then gets “dethinged” or animated opens up a world of new
association which I believe very much to be the function of
art and architecture through its structure, concept and figural
outline.
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