Ingólfur Arnarsson: ...just a shell.

… just a shell. is a year-long exhibition by Ingólfur Arnarsson at i8 Grandi. Throughout the year, the artist will make architectural modifications to the exhibition space through additions and alterations, while the inclusion of a set of drawings serves as a constant in each transformation. Arnarsson’s drawings are built up through layered crosshatching of hard-leaded pencil lines, creating a field of subtle irregularities. Continuously evolving with the addition of new works and interventions, each iteration will be accompanied by a new text by Lani Yamamoto.

A mirage is the image of an object, misplaced. A mountain in the sky, as if floating. The sky on the ground, as if water. Cliffs on the water, as if cliffs. A mirage is a deception but not a delusion. A trick of imagination - of too little, not too much.

The brain assumes light always travels in straight lines - reflecting the world as, and where, it stands. But only the speed of light is constant. Its behaviour is variable. Light is a wave and/or particle. Depending. Waves travel, spreading and interfering. Particles interact, are scattered and absorbed. Over distance, light can curve. Bending to changes of temperature in the air. Linear thinking doesn’t account for twists and turns. Along presumed lines, the image appears elsewhere. Dislocated from its source and otherwise distorted.

Quantum mechanics can’t be expressed in classical terms. At least not with words. Metaphor is its own kind of mirage. (The oasis ahead, the blue of the far off sky.) A mirage occurs most often near the horizon. Low angle light travels farthest to us. The difference in temperatures at the earth’s surface can be vast. If the air nearest the surface is hot and the overlying air cold, light falling from the sky through this gradient is curved upward to us. Because we can only assume sightlines are straight, we see the light coming slant from below, and the image is lower than it should be. Upside down. If temperatures are inverted, the opposite is true. Light is bent down towards us and we see the image higher than it should be. Right side up. (A snowy peak, hovering.) And if vertical and horizontal, hot and cold layers of air happen to be in its path, light from an unknown object can be transformed into otherworldly shapes. Steady or wavering, single or multiple, stretched or compressed. (Bluffs of impossible scale shimmering across the sea.)

Explanations can be made in retrospect but a mirage is unpredictable. Given the shifting complexities of light, its atmospheric lens, and our own observational limits, a mirage is at best a fleeting glimpse of what transpires between. Subject and object. The known and unknowable. It is a coincident misalignment.

A wonder. A surprise. A mirage is the image of a moment, passing.

Lani Yamamoto