Getting up late again because the girl next room hammered something on the wall last night, I took shower and had breakfast. During breakfast, I briefly chatted with the Irish guy Fergal about what we were going to do in Iceland, basically about our projects. The others were still sleeping although it was already 9 a.m. My assumption was that artists tend to sleep long...
It rained the whole last night, continuing to this morning. Rain poured on my roof windows with rather loud noise. When it was raining, it meant that today would me my working day. I started my work with the blog (I now count it as part of my work while I'm here). Updating this blog took quite some time (until lunch). For lunch, I made Lasagna using the pasta sauce left from the day before yesterday. After finishing my lunch, the clouds disappeared and the sky became blue. Why shouldn't I go out then? There was the only answer - leave the building and go somewhere. I was still positive that I would be out for a couple of hours and return to my work when the weather would turn cloudy and rainy in the evening according to what the forecasting said.
I decided to visit two museums on Tryggvagata: one was Reykjavik Museum of Photography and another was Reykjavik Art Museum - Hafnarhus.
While I was walking towards the museums, I noticed a building on the same street as my residence is bravely painted in vivid green. People in this country seem to be brave in making their choices!
While approaching the museums, I dropped by at Kirsuberjatred, a gallery of Icelandic design run by 10 female artists on Vesturgata 4. There were many interesting products, for example, fish skin handbags and zucchini bowls. Everything were pricey though.
Reykjavik Museum of Photography is located in the same building as the public library. It took me a while to find the way to the museum which is on the 6th floor. The architecture of the building didn't have any special details I would like to describe. Perhaps, this is just because it isn't the style I like anyway.
Returning to the content of the exhibits, the museum at the moment featured the exhibition Skovbo by the American Danish photographer Viggo Mortensen. His name sounded familiar. Soon, I realized that he is also an actor who starred in The Lord of the Rings and was nominated for the Academy Award in the best actor category from A History of Violence, a movie directed David Cronenberg! How could a person be so talented! Unbelievable! All of his photographs in the exhibition were amazingly beautiful. Every picture was living and spoke its voice, so that I could further imagine a story beyond the picture's visual. That's why almost all the photographs in this exhibition were already sold! The museum also sold his book of
the same name as the exhibition. I would bought it if the book cover wasn't as it is now. The cover really killed the overall book, unfortunately. However, I found a book of photographs of Icelandic nature by the Icelandic artist Paul Stefansson. All photos in the book were so astonishing that I couldn't resist myself not to buy in order to look at them as often as possible. The museum has also a large archive of old photographs, each of which can be ordered as a print or a digital file. As the price wasn't too expensive and I still felt like I hadn't see enough photographs yet, I went through the archive. Again, I couldn't resist not to have one photograph for my living room. I ordered a panorama photograph of a river running in-between mountains taken by Olafur Magnusson, a famous Icelandic photographer of the early twenty century. On leaving the museum, I felt like I spent a fortune for unnecessary things (which could be counted as pleasure in a moment of my life).
Then, I continued to the neighboring museum - Reykjavik Art Museum - Hafnarhus. The exterior of the build looked plain, except for the eye-catching facade.
Before I start talking about the architecture of the building again, I will tell about the exhibition. The exhibition's name was Experiment Marathon Reykjavik. It investigates how one gains an understanding of the world and how knowledge is built through time. The exhibition was truly experiment. However, it doesn't mean that all the works were interesting. Some of them while attempting to present their experimentation, they lacked sense of persuasiveness that could bring people to enjoy and learn their experimental work. At least for me, I didn't understand some work, or more precisely, didn't even try to do it. However, a few artists had rather interesting experiments, for example the spectrum room in the pictures below by Carlos Cruz-Diez. In terms of aesthetic, the work interacted rather well with the
architecture of the museum, revealing the contrast between glow and darkness: the former belongs to the work while the latter to the dark and glass walls of the building. My favorite exhibits were by Thomas Bayrle. His works shown in this exhibition played with dots, lines and planes, the three basic elements in art. In his works, dots created lines and lines created planes. The combination of the three elements crafted the totality of each work, including its image, form and story.
Having walked around the museum, the architecture of it seemed powerful and its details were carefully designed with the contrasts between colors and between materials. The architecture also corresponded to the environment, for example, huge windows facing the sea that gave natural light to the space.
However, I recognized the downside of the architecture design of the museum beyond its visuality - the functionality of it. Some details that created visual aesthetics weren't practical and could be even dangerous. One example was the staircase where the surface of a few cement steps were partly covers with metal sheets. This detail made the stairway interesting, but the one-centimeter different height between the metal and the concrete surface could cause one falling from the stairs. Safety should be considered more. Another example was the wash basins and taps in the toilet. They looked really nice and fit well together. However, my user experience erased my visual pleasure. When I was using it, water splashed over the basin to the floor. This was just because the basin was too tiny and its distance from the tap was too far. Perhaps, I was too critical again... Before I left the museum, I bought a book about Icelandic design, just to get a glance of how design in this country is.
I stopped by at the secondhand shop Frida Fraenka again. There seemed to be new items. However, I succeeded in not buying anything yet.
Finally, I got back to the residence and started working around 7 p.m.
At 8.10 p.m. ...
At 9.30 p.m., after an hour... Was the piece longer than before?
At 11.30 p.m. ... I hoped it was longer than 2 hours ago.
The weather was still sunny the whole evening, although the Icelandic Meteorological had forecasted that rain would start at 6 p.m... The below was taken from one of my roof windows.
