Sigga Björg Sigurdardottir

PARRICIDE PARK
05.04–06.17.2006
Room 2

A dense and restrained iconographic language raises its unsettling voice in the oeuvre of Icelandic artist Sigga Björg Sigurdardottir.

Rooted in painting, drawing and textual elements her work, elaborated in situ for this exhibition at Clark, will unveil the curiously oneiric life and activities of a group of troll-like figures. This series of depictions of small, “ordinary” events, reprises the beings in image after image – here facing the viewer blankly, there with head buried in a fur-clad lap, and all too often surrounded by the traces of ambiguous liquids, or of violence. In the accumulation, the pictures suggest both the presence of a not-quite-decipherable narrative about their lives, history, and possible culture, and its self-immolation.

Sigurdardottir’s creatures, frequently acephalic or fragmented in other ways, call to mind other monstrous icons: Jarry’s Ubu, for example, the insatiable characters of Rabelais and, of course, the legends that haunt so many Northern European countries, are all recognizably present in the images, but are insufficient to pin them down.

It is the disturbingly ambiguous register in which the artist renders her creatures that strikes the viewer most, referencing as it does a whole range of expressionisms and Saturday morning cartoons at the same time, and that lends them a particularly pointed frisson – like that provoked by the monsters in our childhood closets — particularly when that reference is stressed by the artist’s inclusion of a short animated film in the exhibition.

In fact, it may be this recognition that lends Sigurdardottir’s beasts their power to shake us; the fact that they cannot be so easily dismissed, relegated to myth, to literature or to history, because they are too actual and too familiar. Indeed, in their routine outrages, their banal but unstoppable hunger, their unresolved narratives and absent happy endings, their dislocations even, they are our dark twins, our doppelgangers.

Texte Peter Dubé