Autocast no. 01-10

2011
Pigment inkjet print on photo rag paper
37 x 47 cm

Edition of 3

The Autocast-series is another piece where Hrafnkell Sigurðsson takes the abject of the winter-scape and elevates them, making them into aesthetic objects. The objects he presents us with are haphazard clumps of snow, the remnants of snow and ice that gather under the bodies of cars in heavy snow, creating hard clumps of ice that then break off. They are in that sense “automatically cast” by the body of the car, bearing marks of tires and other objects that cover the underside of vehicles. In winter these tend to clutter the sides of the roads, covered in oil, tar, and grime, beinga nuisance to those passing by. Hrafnkell Sigurðsson, in drawing attention to these haphazard and ephemeral casts, is extending a practice common to modern and postmodern art. They function in a similar way as the series of photographs surrealist artist Salvador Dali had made for the magazine Minotaure in 1936. Those were images of torn and crumpled pieces of paper, or seemingly formless clots of chewing gum, that Dali had photographed and enlarged in order to to reveal beautiful and charming structures. The Autocast-series also share affinities to the works of Gabriel Orozco, who in his photographic works focuses on the beauty of haphazard objects in a chaotic environment. Hrafnkell Sigurðsson, is in Autocast working within a similar frame of reference, by drawing attention to the importance of minute details that for others do not merit attention. The title of the works, Autocast, also is a clever reworking of the term “outcast”. As such it shifts the attention to the down and out in society, to those unfortunates that cannot help but being cast outside of society as such; people that no one cares about or wants to know about. Thus the title of the work involves a tacit political twist.