Viking Jupiter Art Collection

THE SPA | DECK 1 ELVAR

THE SPA | DECK 1 ELVAR ÖRN KJARTANSSON 1972 • ICELAND • PHOTOGRAPHY Elvar Örn Kjartansson is an autodidact Icelandic photographer who has traveled across the globe in search of motifs. His practice has taken him from the extreme heat and dust of the Death Valley in California and the Namib Desert in Namibia, to the freezing cold of Ny-Ålesund in Svalbard and the stormy conditions on the Fimbul Ice Shelf in Antarctica. At these vastly different locations, he has explored a wide range of techniques in art photography. Kjartansson’s perspective of the earth changed when he captured his first frame of Iceland from the air on a small, open microlight aircraft. The colors and patterns of the earth from above continued to draw him back up in the air, and he developed a passion for aerial photography. This technique provided the expression he was looking for—an abstraction provided by the landscape itself. All of Kjartansson’s aerial photographs are taken from heights of 150 to 250 meters, mostly of Icelandic rivers. There are many types of rivers in Iceland, from freshwater lakes to glacial streams and geothermal rivers; each has its own character and is constantly changing while on its way to the ocean. Kjartansson is interested in these changes and the mixes of colors they produce. Kjartansson sees himself as a conceptual artist with photography as his main output. His concepts and visions are supported by a foundational philosophy. Many of his projects start as ideas on a piece of paper, and it is here that the vision starts to form. After the visualization comes the method: how he will capture it and in which format. As the development of the project progresses, the concept and philosophy take form. Though, with his aerial projects, he views himself as an art reproduction photographer, making copies of an ever-changing canvas where nature, the greatest artist of all, is the original creator of an ongoing work of art, the earth. RIVER DELTA #01 | 2017 76