AMANDA HUGHEN
2005 Firmament : Turpentine gallery : Reykjavik Iceland
2006 Firmament : ampersand international arts : San Francisco Ca
2007 Firmament : galerie Immanence : Paris France
ARNGUNNUR YR
FIRMAMENT
According to the Book of Genesis, on his second day of work, God created the firmament right after separating light from darkness, when the earth was still “void and without form” . It is interesting to note the priority given to shaping the expanse over shaping the void. First there was the edge of comprehendible space, and somewhere below it, existed a raw, unseen, and unformed earth. The word firmament derives from the venacular firmamentum, used to translate the Hebrew raki'a, which specifically denotes something hammered or forged in order to be extended. Ancient civilizations - Hebrews, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans - all believed the firmament to be a solid dome beaten from the hardest metal, a wall strong enough to separate the celestial reservoir from the waters of the earth.
The intention to configure nature to the specifications of the built environment is also evident in Hughen's wall sculptures and drawings. Evocative of the rugged and fog-laden coast of Northern California, whose dominating atmospheric conditions create an ever-shifting vista, her landscapes are vast, abstracted, and still in the process of formation.
The marks Hughen makes are repetitive, uniform, and mechanical. The artist strives to remove herself - her hand, her judgment, her experiences - from their creation, allowing the process to take over and this new world to form its own geological history. Bunched together, the shapes coalesce into undulating and overlapping patterns that resemble eons of physical upheaval compressed into a single space and moment.
Multiple histories collapse and intertwine upon each other; eddying streams and eroding cliffs occupying the same plane as shifting continents. Unfettered by scale, these panoramas are as intimate as they are vast. Hughen's drawings become objects which become land masses with attending incisions and outcroppings. We as viewers are caught between a state of suspension and submersion, hovering above these topographies and crashing down into them when we shift from observing the whole in order to focus on a detail.
It is this elevated perspective - as if viewing from the crown of the firmament - which Hughen's drawings share with Yr's oil on panel paintings, whose weighty accumulations of cumulous clouds stretch the atmosphere to dizzying heights. Both artists expand their views beyond what the eye can naturally register, as if placing the viewer at the edge of comprehension. Each builds careful layers in their work, eschewing a simple association between surface and dimensionality, but with very different results. Where Hughen's patterns swoop across the surface, Yr's accumulated brushwork saturates it. The former entangles the viewer; the latter absorbs; yet both exert a force that aspires to penetrate the heavens.
In Yr's landscapes, voluminous clouds build larger and larger, expanding over a barely discernible ground. Simultaneously evoking the majestic heavens of 18th C. vedute - or view - paintings and the volatile, sparse Icelandic terrain, they impart a muted, infatuating beauty and uncompromising sense of isolation. The skies are dense, energetic and almost solid. Closer inspection discloses a surface that is scraped away, revealing layer upon careful layer of riotous color. Rifts and gouges erode the celestial barrier; scars shape the horizon. It might be difficult to affix oneself within this space - the atmosphere climbs beyond any possible point of contact - if not for these fissures. They create a subtle push and pull, drawing one in, continually shifting one's gaze until all the breaks in the firmament appear.
The paintings convey a Baroque sensibility with their soaring spaciousness, evocation of grandeur, drama, and tension.
Just as the firmament conceals the mysteries of the deities, Yr's indomitable and wondrous skies probe at something deeper.
Yr's world - where the canopy covering the feeble earth seems to threaten to tip it over - is perhaps a reflection of our own, where the certainty of life could easily be upended.
The earth shifts on a regular basis, both below and on the surface, so it was not accidental that the ancient myths affixed the concept of eternity to the solid and immutable heavens. They wrought it as metal, and gave it the potential to be infinitely forged. In turn Hughen and Yr shape the world over and over again. For them, void is never formless, but an endless number of places to make visible and real. "
PATRICIA MALONEY 2005
(excerpt from exhibition catalogue )
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