#3 [July 2005]

Iceland Specimen Collection - Sleipnir, Cyclope, Janus 2003 C-Print 80 x 480cm

Walking along Reykjavik’s south coast, one encounters a penguin-like bird on a boulder in the sea (see editorial). Clearly artificial—metallic, smooth—it is a duplicate of the extinct great auk. Out of reach in the cold sea, Olöf’s sculpture is a beaked ghost located at the coast off of which the last known nesting pair of great auks was killed in 1844. Aware that the great auks were near extinction, collectors offered large sums of money for display specimens, and the pair was killed by Icelanders for a foreign collector. More than a century-and-a-half after the last great auk was killed, the nation’s reassessment of its past took the form of a campaign to acquire a stuffed great auk reputed to have been “from” Iceland. Both the 1844 killings and the 1973 purchase from Sotheby’s involved dealings with foreign collectors; and Olöf’s representation of the extinct great auk, about twice the size of the actual bird, is cast of aluminum, a material whose production for foreign interests has led to further impoverishment of Iceland’s natural environment.
The irony of the great auk’s extinction is that its rarity was its demise: it was the desire to display the rare bird that contributed to its value and hastened its extinction. The politics and aesthetics of display are central preoccupations of many of Olöf’s works. In a 1996 exhibition at The Living Arts Museum, animals associated with Icelandic folklore are represented in plaster and displayed as if neoclassical figures. In the 1998 “Corpus Dulcis,” fragments of an idealized male body are cast in chocolate and heaped on a podium for the consumption of viewers.

Iceland Specimen Collection – Raven 2005. C-Print 60 x 90cm

The recent “Iceland Specimen Series” includes photographs of albino birds. Clearly lifeless, lying on their side with wings closed, the specimens float against the cliché-clouds of blue skies. The images are a curious entanglement of visual conventions associated with natural history tableaus and the painting tradition of vanitas.
The “Iceland Specimen Series” also features deformed lambs, including a two-headed lamb and a six-legged lamb, that were stuffed in the early part of last century. The stuffed animals once belonged to a Reykjavik animal museum frequented by the artist when she was a child. Olöf photographed the animals in the Icelandic landscape; the results allude not only to Iceland’s history of landscape painting but also to the folklore of monstrosity. “The Iceland Specimen Series” includes the photograph of a stuffed animal reputed to be a skoffín, a mix of dog and fox mentioned in Icelandic folklore. The function of the specimen in natural history is to provide an example of a pattern or category. Olöf’s “specimen” of the skoffín, however, is a categorical error and at the same time a mythic creature.
Olöf’s work continues to explore the folkloric traditions surrounding Icelandic nature as well as those scientific practices that, in their seeking to preserve and display nature, also fictionalize it.

Olöf studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. She received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, followed by an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 1993. She was recently awarded the prestigious 2005 Richard Serra Award as well as a grant from the Center for Icelandic Art for the production of a catalogue to be published in conjunction with her solo exhibition at Gallery I8, opening on September 1.

Eva Heisler