Middle English (in the senses ‘meet as an adversary’ and ‘a meeting of adversaries’; formerly also as incounter): from Old French encontrer (verb), encontre (noun), based on Latin in- ‘in’ + contra ‘against’.

 A series of paintings and a series of drawings and a mural are the nuts and bolts of this latest exhibition of the artist Erla S. Haraldsdóttir at Neskirkja. The series is structured around the theme of a meeting and is an outgrowth of the artist’s own connection to her great-great-grandmother, via a diary that her kinswoman wrote in the 1930s. In the diary, her ancestor writes about a formative dream that her mother had, in which she met a “hidden woman.” Erla was so intrigued by this meeting between a young woman and a supernatural person, common to Icelandic folk belief systems, that she made a series of works based on this, titled “My Mother’s Dream” at Gallery Gudmundsdóttir in 2023, or “Dreams of my Mother” at Listasafn Árnesingar in 2024.

For the current work, the artist revisits and depicts encounters in a broad sense, she adopts a wide-angle view on world art history and mythologies and displays representations of the annunciation of the Virgin Mary, Krishna, a cave painting of a shapeshifting Khoi San from prehistoric Southern Africa, a praying mantis, and a fox. These disparate figures hold in common that they can be avatars for an encounter with the numinous or the self. Foxes in Japanese and Chinese folk beliefs and mythologies can shapeshift into spirit women who trick and seduce young men. The Angel of the annunciation interrupts the Virgin Mary while she is reading and tells her of her coming fate to become a mother to the son of God. The Khoi San engage in trance dances in which shamans mimic and become the animals that are significant for the survival of the clan of kinfolk.

Beyond the meetings with personifications of self or the numinous, Erla Haraldsdóttir is also keen to present and reference the technologies that currently facilitate and complicate our human encounters: the telephone and the smart telephone. She appropriates the master of pop art appropriation, Andy Warhol, and his 1950s drawing of an early telephone. Also, she makes a drawing of a “home screen” of a current model of an Apple iPhone. The iPhone is inscribed within a radiant “halo” that is covered with silver and gold leaf, it is a proposition, a suggestion about the deification of the current technologies, or human relationship towards them, be it one of sublime awe, technological optimism, mistrust and skepticism, or reluctant dependency. 

Another encounter that the artist seeks to include in this series of The Encounter, is that of humans and a solar eclipse, based on recent photos taken of a 90% solar eclipse that occurred in North America on April 8th, 2024. This is an attempt to recapture a sense of wonder that people experienced during the eclipse that additionally taps into deep-seated fears and uncertainties that emerge from this rare, yet regular, celestial event. What happens when the regular patterns of sunrise and sunset are disrupted by a transit of the moon? What happens when the planet’s natural satellite gets in the way of our life-giving source, the light of the sun? This momentary interruption was the source of myths, and a prompt for the more scientifically inclined to find out what is the cause of this phenomena. 

Painting or drawing is a way for the artist to think through a subject, it is also a means by which to explore a theme and experiment with historical and cultural artifacts. Painting and drawing is a meditative or contemplative process for Haraldsdóttir and while source imagery is utilized, it is assimilated or digested into the corpus of her body of work. The images, individually, then act as scenes in a montage or a dream sequence, dreams and their symbolism have been an increasing interest for the artist as well. The landscapes that we contain within our minds as we sleep are only in part explicable with science, and the large questions, the how and the why of dreams, remain mysterious. As does the impact of the chance meetings of subjects within sleep. Clearly, such meetings hold great importance universally as evidenced by various religious traditions, and sleep, a necessary part of human homeostasis, is another universal commonality of the human condition.

The artist then strives to set up an encounter between the public and her work to inspire, promote curiosity and reflection. In the process of exhibiting work, a dialogue can occur where new ideas and further meetings and connections happen.

Dr. Craniv Boyd