Melting the Horizon

Ieva Grigelionyte works on the poetics of noticing. These are a loosely spiritual endeavour - a broth of visual awareness and calm alertness that attunes a person to the space around them at any given time. Her installation, Melting the Horizon, invites to a living room atmosphere in a public space, attempting through juxtaposition and whimsy to engineer an opportunity for those passing by. They may pause, stop or just be. She achieves this by simply putting something to look at (a frozen television) and a place to look at it from (a sofa). The ice inside the television makes it both the screen and the programme, as well as its melting suggesting temporality and the unique feeling that comes from knowing you were in the right place at the right time.This piece was installed in Grandi, originally industrial area in Reykjavik, currentlyundergoing rapid gentrification. Public space contains so much energy from so many sources that it can be both the best and the worst place to exist simultaneously: it is a chaotic space where the unexpected can cause discomfort. Control over the environment is limited. The piece is an effortto mitigate these constraints. Visitors are encouraged (but not forced) to move in certain ways, inspired (but not pressured) to use the space creatively, asked (but not told) to feel they are helping to shape the space even as they enjoy themselves within it. Perhaps the experience watching small change occur will encourage the audience to reflect upon the bigger, though equally incremental changes that surround them. It may also suggest something of processes repeating themselves as we watch ice slowly transform back into water, in the way that areas decline, regenerate, reinvent and re-emerge.

Artistic Statement

As an artist I call myself an Object Choreographer. My work has been greatly influenced by the things I have collected personally over the years as a result of my klepto-creative, semi-pathological process. In the end, however, composing and arranging these objects is just as important as collection. Once I have accrued a large store of ideas and objects, I look for connections between them – what is it that draws me to this particular group of things? Eventually these thoughts and patterns solidified into what I call Object Choreography. This method enables me to enter any space and map novel relationships between the objects therein.The deliberately drawn implication of ‘dancing’ is something that delineates these actions from mechanically performed routine, hopefully giving the impression instead that this is a process requiring the mind’s full attention and a passionate sense of companionship with the objects themselves. This is two-headed: I am both attempting to choreograph objects in a space as if they could respond to me, and moving around them myself as if we were partners in dance.I care greatly about what goes where but have no end-state in mind. There is no final composition. In its place, a shady method. This is best described as listening to the objects, patiently absorbing their silent desires and arranging them thus. It is as if I place items according to some hidden grammar, in a language of space.