“In Terms of the Show”
Skaftfell Art Center
Seydisfjordur, Iceland
October 2025
single ink serigraphy prints
40x22 cm
laser cut UV prints on plexiglass
59 x 36 cm
2 channel video, no sound
4m20s
dimensions variable
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Sculpt, hold, control.
And so this text is a conversation. Or rather a text informed by a conversation. Perhaps it is evidence that conversation took place. But it is also a text run through by rude interruptions; interrupted by television commercials from the 1980s. A type of narrative collapse.
Mousse that shapes. Body that’s great.
To be on an artist residency is to be in a very peculiar space somewhere between home and work. It involves cooking, sleeping, the building of familiarity, making, appearing, showing something held from or against the place. The space between the English 'artist-in-residence' and the Icelandic 'Gestalistamaður' is a particularly useful. In the English, the artist is living here, they are in residence and therefore at home as such. In the Icelandic, they are guest artists, not at home but invited into an existing one. For the artist, especially for artists working with social practice, or with their own body, or with mechanisms by which we record spaces of sociality, home is itself a complicated word. It is Kristina - working with pixels from an image of the residency house captured by a municipal webcam - that says of making art whilst on residency, 'Everything does seem to come back to the experience of living in this building every day.' Artists often work at home. Their private lives are shaped into public works, and the outside also interrupts, or is welcomed in. At a reading group hosted by Yvette and Jake, we talk about being an unorthodox host, assembling ghosts. Both ghosts and uninvited guests are fractures in conviviality.
Fixing spray. Fix, quick, for tricks, spritz, lift. Sculpt your hair any way you like it.
A few days ago I asked Ni if we should meet at their studio to talk about what this text might be. They reply via text: 'No, I am not using a studio studio...' So instead we meet in my home. We are, what Agnes Heller calls, 'geographically promiscuous'. I ask Yvette and Jake what a home is. We talk about how the concept is particularly acute when thinking of how it’s affected by the shadow of distant genocides, that the world's largest cosmetics company occupies ethnically cleansed land.
Fixing gel. Spray. Fix, play tricks, sculpt your hair.
What is a studio studio? The repetition is classification. A studio studio is a studio proper. Ni’s studio is under the water. We talk about how the sensual is a way of communicating that brings into existence possibilities outside of language. A shared cigarette. A swim. A glitch is perhaps a jump out of language, a jump in which language becomes aesthetics. When it becomes sound.
Strong gel, twist, spike it, the way you like it. Sculpt your hair any way you like it!
I am aged 3 to 13. The '80s were home because those years were formative. Home formed something. The 'studio studio' awakens a memory of something from my childhood. A series of TV commercials from the late '80s opens with the word 'STUDIO'. They are selling hair products to bring the studio to your home. A group of young people, holding musical instruments, burst through a paper screen painted like a Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, as if they are invading an art gallery. They attend to their hair like it both defines and provides their energy. In the commercials the first syllable of the product is stuttered as if run through a sampler or scratched as if the advertisement was being performed on turntables. The video does this too: the group's burst through the Mondrian set vacillates backwards and forwards incoherently into content as if the studio has been invaded at all levels of production.
Kristina and I talk about the fiction of light passing through a camera and the screen as a surface. Ni tells me the story of a dad talking to his son about the postcoital cannibalism of the praying mantis. Ni talks about it like a parable of relationships under Capitalism.
The products being advertised said that if we brought the studio's products into our home, our homes could also be a studio. They said that we could consider our hair (and, by extension, ourselves) as things to be sculpted. Through appropriating the language of hip hop, the products are connected to a series of forms and languages that reject disciplinarity, a series of connected cultural practices based around associations of the local; of neighborhood. But these commercials use the co-opting tendencies of Capitalism that ingests and repurposes critique towards its own expansion.
Ni makes the sign of the praying mantis. They talk about alternatives; about how being consumed doesn't have to be like that. 'Why would you be with a person if you could be with a mountain?’
But we are also talking about evidence. What is the evidence when you are swallowed by water or an image? When the cigarette is passed between us? When it is predicated on a subjective share language of the virtual? When the CCTV camera, supposedly the most objective form of evidence, is an unreliable witness to the spaces around it, its evidence obscured by raindrops, focal displacements, missing frames? When the artwork is not an object finished and final but is enveloped in conversations, sensualities and connections?
Kristina talks about images as sensation. The sensation of media. But as much about other interruptions; about the weather as an agent in photography.
Repetition does something. It gives emphasis, but it also contains. Repetition is a way to contain the chaos of the world. It makes a studio studio; it makes a home home, but in doing so it limits the messy edges that are part of how we connect to each other. But sometimes, like in hip hop, repetition is a scratch. A fracture. A hand forcing a mechanism against itself to expand its language beyond discipline. In this case, the studio and the home escape like a noise through a wall. The studio is a ripped net. It is the lens of the camera hosting a drop of rain. It is wood, reused from one house to another.
Text by Mark Rohtmaa-Jackson