Ragnar Kjartansson

While encountering Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors,” one cannot help but discern a palpable sense of kinship, reminiscent of the communal bonding that often transpires during artist residencies—a zone not entirely aberrant to this artist’s practice. The exquisite nine-channel video that makes up the entirety of this show and shares a title with it was shot at Rokeby Farm in upstate New York, a bucolic estate gone to seed. Set primarily in the elegant manor house, the film is musical rehearsal–cum–performance art piece that takes place in nine different rooms simultaneously. Each musician is captured in one of the mansion’s rooms, and all of them (many of whom are close friends of the artist) are shot playing a bracing melody based off a poem written by the artist’s former wife. The nine performances, each one featured on its own respective screen, are synced both visually and acoustically and have all the hallmarks of a cathartic working through of lost love, with plaintive lines like, “There are stars exploding around you and there is nothing you can do.” There is Kjartansson soaking in a bathtub strumming a ukulele, a woman bent over a cello at the top of a stairwell, and a group gathered on a porch, singing in unison. The projections are grand in scale and baroque in feel, and they light up the darkened gallery, plunging the viewer physically, acoustically, and visually into the middle of a dense relational fabric.

The evocation of the rich communitarian ethos of the artist residency is notable in that we could reasonably argue that residencies have in recent years yielded a substantial influence over artistic production. It is a core that is at a remove from the center. Which is to say, residencies are the site of some of the most intense relational exchanges—be they creative, intellectual, or personal—that occur far from the marketplaces of contemporary art. That Kjartansson harnesses, and puts to use, these intense emotional connections fostered through a secluded scene of creative production shows the artist to be an astute scout of affective territory. Kjartansson in many respects could be thought to be a pioneer of “Residency Art,” wherein that which is normally unavailable to public view is brought to the fore, exposing and giving form to the intimacy that drives the creative process.