VIDEO: Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson at William Busta Gallery
Another video exclusive.
Five videos in five hours?
Between the hours of six and eleven PM on the evening of November 16, 2012, Cool Cleveland visited five creative hotspots and spoke with five of Cleveland's most interesting people.
This was stop number one:
Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson at William Busta Gallery
Hailing from Rejkavic, Iceland and inspired by her annual visits back home, Cleveland Heights fiber artist Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson and gallerist William Busta stood in front of one of Jonsson's monumental new hangings and talked with Cool Cleveland.
Busta is Cleveland's premier gallerist and has been following Jonsson's work for over 27 years, since was was earning her Masters of Fine Arts at Kent State University.
She's had solo exhibitions in New York Chicago and regularly in Reykjavik, and with Busta since 1997. She's appeared in group shows in Miami, Northern Ireland, Barcelona and Fourmies-Trelon, France. She won the Wendy L. Moore Emerging Artist award from MOCA Cleveland, and was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize in 2008. Her work is in the collections of Agnes Gund, Toby Lewis and many corporations.
Inspired by the fissures, cracks and shifting geophysical plates observed in her volcanic Iceland, she hand-paints silk and weaves it into hauntingly beautiful hanging sheets that tremble and wobble, slightly out of focus. Fire, ice, water, shore, rocks, are her touchstones, but these elemental forces, hung in heavy membranes, forfeit their rigidity without losing their power. In her work, nothing is static.
The landscapes and close-ups of her homeland are captured in photographs during her frequent visits to Iceland, then transferred to fabric on her loom. Recently acquiring a huge 10-foot wide loom has allowed Jonsson to create works on a scale rarely seen.
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