Laine Rettmer + Isabel Beavers "'Seydisfjordur Slates is a work from the collaborative e'xhibition 'MELT'. 'MELT' seeks to formulate a process through which illusion and icon become a simulacrum of origin and truth. In doing so, it broadens the idea of origin stories as based predominantly in the agency of male character. The work in MELT responds to Norse mythology and the phenomenological experience of the Icelandic landscape. Method and distribution both become unreliable mediators in this work that seeks to question the stability and authority of story. Seydisfjordur Slates are an archive of unsused ‘b-roll’ footage shot in on the Icelandic landscape. The USB drives store video clips: the characters who measured the Votnajokull Glacier with tape, created compositions of ice forms with red surveying stakes, drew in the snow with foot tracks, and performed rituals in geothermal caves. The characters at times overcome the physicality and vastness of the landscape—other times they are subsumed by it. The work integrates images of field-based video with 3D modeling, complicating what the viewer believes to be the site of the mythology. The technology then achieves what the human cannot: an omniscient if incomplete perspective on the site of the artists’ stories. This placement allows the viewer to believe in these new stories as myth and origin."
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