Kota Rota Dota
A triptych of collages named after an ancient Lithuanian curse, presented as part of the exhibition Nightmare Fuel curated by Christopher Gerberding at Y Gallery Reykjavik with Laura Sundermann, Sóley Ragnarsdóttir, and Bradley Davies.
Digital C Prints custom framed under Museum Glass, 42 x 32 x 2,5 cm, 2023, Edition of 3
Photos by Leifur Wilberg Orrason.
With Nightmare Fuel, Y Gallery presents four international positions for the first time in Reykjavik. Laura Sundermann, Krzysztof Honowski, Sóley Ragnarsdóttir, and Bradley Davies present approaches across mediums that reflect on the fantastical, the ornate, the horrifying, and the spaces between.
The exhibition deals concretely with the space of the Y Gallery as a on-place, divorced from its former function, yet placed within its dissonant echo. After all, if you look through either door to the gallery it will surely not be long before you see a car refuel. Indeed, it is only a matter of time before a driver comes in looking for chewing gum, only to find other nourishment herein.
The Y Gallery is suspended hauntologically between futures, the post-war vision of Iceland as a car country, and the present hopes of a green new world. People and machines pass through here constantly, but rarely come to rest here. This agitation is taken up in the exhibition in works that carefully consider an excess of imagination, the uneasy processing that envelopes the brain unexpectedly in the dead of night.
We are on the fluctuating border between mental and physical landscapes, where perception is distorted and shattered. In Laura Sundermann‘s The Mirror Works this takes the form of slick glass shards that conflate a traumatic accident in the artist‘s past with our strange post-pandemic present. The text that is splintered on the wall is sometimes from Christa Wolf‘s Cassandra, at other points from articles about reproductive medicine. It‘s hard to tell when you‘re flying through the air in the middle of a roadside collision.
Sóley Ragnarsdóttir‘s pieces hang suspended in the centre of the old shop floor of the gas station. These hearts are marked by precious stones and tied together with lace, (un)broken and furious with joy. Each work is also stuck in a night-time eclipse, like a tarot card revealing the unseen forces that you were only warned about in your sleep.
Krzysztof Honowski‘s three collages take their title from an ancient Lithuanian curse. If you walk in the Baltic countryside you should whisper Kota Rota Dota to ward off poisonous snakes. The pieces vacillate between comedy and abjection, while the imperfect 3D scanning employed in the rendering of the images reflects on the mythologies of flaws and curses.
Bradley Davies‘ work See Through You reflects on the popular genealogy of nightmarish images. When you look at the tortured eyes that possess the image you cannot help but recall the work of Stanley Kubrick. Here one is confronted with the intrinsically discomfiting state of the uncanny: an image you know too well, but that can continue to possess your perception. Nightmare Fuel.
7.10.2023 - 28.10.2023