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#2 [June 2005] |
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Finnbogi Petursson
| Born in 1959, artist Finnbogi Petursson studied at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts in Reykjavík and at the Jan Van Eyck Akademie in Holland. From the beginning, his focus has been on using electronically generated sounds to created exhibition environments, often in conjunction with light and even water. Thus, in a 1991 exhibition in the Living Arts Museum in Reykjavik and again in the Asmundur Sveinsson Museum in 2003, Finnbogi used sound to generate ripples on water which were then projected using light onto the interior of the gallery. Though sound is his primary medium, the installations are always visually arresting as well and the viewer participates as he passes through the space.
The overall effect of Finnbogi’s installations is remarkably delicate, often evoking a kind of poetic contemplation as the viewer explores the effects produced by the sound and lights and the objects that produce them. This is perhaps most evident in pieces such as “Circular Kubes”, shown in the Gothenburg Konsthall in 2002, where angular speakers produce sounds that redefine their space in terms of circles. The research that goes into these works has come to turn more often on the basic mysteries of tonal intervals and mathematics, the sort of thing that sometimes makes the early Greek mathematicians seem more like a mystical cult than the originators of our most exact science. The golden section is one of these perennial mysteries and Finnbogi has expressed it in a work that sits on top of the Akureyri Art Museum in Northern Iceland and traces an endless spiral of light onto the sky, visible only on cloudy nights when everyone in the town can look up to contemplate the divine proportions revered by Phidias and his followers in the fifth century BCE.
When Finnborgi Pétursson was selected to represent Iceland the the 2001 Biennale in Venice, he transformed the small Icelandic pavilion into a large, tunnel-like, “musical” instrument. As guests passed through, the building generated sound that combined in the tonal interval known as The Diabolus, a sound that was actually banned by the medieval church. The technical execution involved creating two sounds, one of 61.8hz and the other measuring 44.7hz; together they form the interference wave of 17hz that is the Diabolus. Gregory Volk wrote about this installation at the time: “Mixing medieval methodology and up to date electronic technology, Pétursson's work conflates past and present, and his tunnel becomes a kind of time chamber, a conduit between the centuries. Importantly, Pétursson has constructed his tunnel in such a way that it is essentially a private experience for the viewer/listener. In a crowded place, you are not in a crowd at all but instead alone with this haunting sound which comes with a very powerful cultural history.”
JP
Finnbogi Petursson is one of the 11
artists who are actually introduced in the CIA.IS – Center
for Icelandic Art in Reykjavík (until end of August). |
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