Here, There and Everywhere - (pressrelease)

Saturday april 7th at 2pm the show Here, There and Everywhere by Erla Haraldsdottir and Bo Melin opens at Galleri@hlemmur.is.

Erla Haraldsdottir, a native of Iceland, moved to Sweden at the age of ten and has since then only stayed in Iceland for shorter periods of time. She studied Fine art at the Royal Academy in Stockholm, The San Francisco Art Institute and the Valand Art Academy in Gothenburg, where she graduated in 1998.

Bo Melin is born and raised in Sweden and studied at Konstfack in Stockholm as well as the Valand Art Academy where he graduated in 1997.

In their exhibition “Here, There and Everywhere” Erla and Bo play with the notion of setting askew the reality that we have come to know through our immediate environment. With the assistance of digitally manipulated photographs they change the homogenous and monocultural city of Reykjavik into a multicultural city.

In preparation for this show/exhibition Erla and Bo travelled to San Francisco and Berlin to photograph the cities and their inhabitants.

This is the second collaboration of these two artists. Six months prior to this show they did a project that involved a five metre long panorama picture of a town square in a small provincial town in mid-Sweden called Skoghall. In this piece, shown at the local Arts Centre, Erla and Bo changed the view of this small town into a rundown suburb of a big city. Skoghall served the purpose of this project because of its status as a small, well-functioning welfare society without major problems.

It is very easy to take things and circumstances for granted, especially within your own daily environment. A central perspective, where your perception of what is right and wrong, or even normal is formed by your immediate circumstances in society, is easily created if you live in a stable society.

These are some of the thoughts and concerns that Erla S. Haraldsdottir and Bo Melin have based this project on, and hopefully it will give cause to even more thoughts with the viewers.

Text by Erla S. Haraldsdóttir and Bo Melin