Episode 52: Ólafur Elíasson's Untitled (Spiral) (2017)
“If I feel like part of a space, I feel like I can change the space.”
When my family and I took a frigid sojourn to Reykjavik for my dad's 70th birthday a few years ago, we had no sense of how oddly meditative it would be to stand inside Danish-Icelandic artist Ólafur Elíasson’s warm satellite studio, beneath this untitled spiral, watching the simultaneous ascent and descent of a perfectly-engineered chrome swirl.
Elíasson is a tough artist to explain; you kind of just have to be there, allowing him to play with your senses. He pumps raw galleries full of light and fog, quietly asking you to question your own perceptions of your environment and your relationship to the natural world, all the while encouraging you to take a nice, deep breath. And this breath, and the calm it creates, readies us to take the next step: to change this space for the better.
Images Referenced:
Music Used:
The Andrews Sisters, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen"
The Blue Dot Sessions, “Daymaze,” “Plate Glass,” “Discovery Harbor,” “Wahre,” “Checkered Blue,” “Quarry Clouds,” “Enter the Room”
