RETTMER + 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."

Seydisfjordur Slates

Laine Rettmer

Laine Rettmer is a North American visual artist and opera director. Their work explores performance, gender, desire, and methods of social control. Rettmer’s work has been presented nationally and internationally at the Vizcaya Museum; Manifesta; MoMA Public, curated by Mel Logan and Jakob Boeskov; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum for the exhibition, Hot Steam; the Illuminus Festival; the Yuan Art Museum; Yve Yang Gallery; Perkins and Ping; Present Company; NADA NY, NADA Presents; and AREA gallery, among others. Recent awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and a MAP Fund grant for the collaborative opera, Standby Snow: Chronicles of a Heat Wave, an Art Alliance Fellowship from HFBK Hamburg, a research fellowship from the Center for Arts Design and Social Research, and residences at Skaftfell Center for Visual Arts in Iceland, Robert Wilson’s Watermill Foundation on Long Island, and MassArt’s Brant Gallery.

Isabel Beavers

Isabel Beavers is a multimedia artist and educator based in Los Angeles. Her work explores ecologies, examines environmental histories and postulates about climate futures through multimedia installation + new media. She is a co-founder of Great Pause Project, Sci Art Ambassador with Supercollider Gallery, and 2019-20 Resident Artist with CultureHub LA. Beavers recent work probes our cultural responses to climate change by exposing inequitable systems of thought and exploring the use of emerging technology for both scientific research and artistic expression. Recent projects investigate Arctic melt, Norse mythology, California mega-fires, Mars colonization, and artificial ecologies. Her work can be viewed at www.isabelbeavers.com.

Her work has been exhibited at: SPRING/BREAK Art Show (2020)/ CultureHub LA (2020)/ SUPERCOLLIDER Gallery (2020)/ MIT Museum (2019)/ New York Hall of Science (2019)/ Icebox Project Space (2019)/ Boston Cyberarts Gallery (2019)/ Adelson Galleries (2019) / Art Science Exhibits, HumboldtUniversitat zu Berlin (2018). Mountain Time Arts (2017)/ Emerson Contemporary Media Arts Gallery (2017). Upcoming Exhibitions include Maiden LA (2020)/ San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (2021)/Torrance Art Museum (2021)/ Museum of Design Atlanta (2021).