The uncanny is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange or uncomfortably familiar. In his show, We Have To Leave This Place Slevin continues his preoccupation into the uncanny through the land and sound scapes of Northern Iceland.
Most commonly working as a sound artist, here Slevin arranges a series of monochromatic prints that make the familiar unfamiliar through positive/negative representations. Slevin ventures into what is unheard and charges the bleak beauty represented in these prints with recorded sounds from above and below; the aurora borealis’s jingling in the sky above us, the rich reverberating hum of seismic activity within the earth. Using found material, the artist builds an installation that encases this sound. The installation is a place we cannot enter. It contains and so controls the unfamiliar in a place that is restricted, unrevealed. It lies within our reach and yet we remain outside, within the familiar. |
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