The End

The Banff Centre
Walter Phillips Gallery
Glyde Hall, St. Julien Way
Banff, Alberta, Canada

January 30 – April 18
Ragnar Kjartansson: The End

"A self-described radical post-romantic, the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson traveled westbound towards the Rocky Mountains in search of the epic. Working primarily as a performance artist, Kjartansson is known for his spectacular and humorous stagings of extreme character types, from the knight and rock outcast to the lonely crooner. In Banff the artist sought to create a cacophonic folk-country music video in the guise of a Davy Crockett-clad outlaw. Drawing on the nostalgic representations of nature found in sources as varied as paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and the cover of the Supertramp album Even in the Quietest Moments, his work is a dramatized engagement with Canada’s frontier.

The End -- Rocky Mountains is a five-channel video installation synched together as a single disfigured country music arrangement in the chord of G. Produced with the support of The Banff Centre for the Icelandic Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, the piece was developed by Kjartansson in collaboration with Icelandic musician Davíd Thór Jónsson at the Centre in February 2009."

Artist’s Talk: January 28, 4 p.m.
Opening Reception: January 29, 7 p.m.
Country & Western Hour: Friday, January 29, 9:30 p.m.

[text and graphic from gallery website. Caption: "Ragnar Kjartansson production shot The End (2009) Photo: Laura Vanags. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York; and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik." Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]